Ah, autumn!! After such a harsh summer, I’m in love with the slight melancholy settling on the landscape, and with the joys of picking and processing apples, hazelnuts, grapes, courgettes… and pumpkin!
I made pumpkin soup for lunch (see Instagram), but decided I wanted to incorporate it into dessert as well. I had some cream cheese and energy balls left so this was the ideal solution to using up three leftover foods in one go. It’s simply delicious, so I’m really pleased to share the recipe.
Ingredients
8 energy balls (see my recipe here – but without the oreo cover obvs)
350g cream cheese (I used lactose-free Philadelphia)
220g pumpkin puree (I made my own – peel and core the pumpkin, cut into medium sized pieces and put into a 180C oven for 40mins, then puree in the blender. You can buy ready-made stuff too)
80g raw cane sugar (or substitute with xylitol, coconut sugar etc – for the moment I’m using regular sugar as I’m not tolerating the other stuff well – I just use less)
60g cream (either lactose-free or dairy-free; today I used soy cream) + extra for whipping
30g buckwheat or rice flour
2 eggs
1 heaped tsp speculaas spice
1/2 orange, cut into segments
some chocolate buttons and honeycomb (I made my own from the BBC good food recipe), for decorating
Instructions
First make the pumpkin puree (see above).
Pre-heat the oven to 170C (fan).
Then make the cake base by lining and greasing a 14cm round cake tin and pressing the energy balls onto the bottom. Put the cake tin into the oven for 10mins.
In the meantime, beat the cream cheese with the pumpkin puree, sugar, cream, flour, and spice until smooth and creamy. Then add the eggs and beat again for 1 minute.
Pour the mix into the cake tin and put into the oven for 55-60mins. About 40mins in, you’ll want to put an aluminium sheet on top of the cake to stop it from burning.
Leave the cake to cool down in the tin and then transfer to the fridge for 2 hours.
You can then take it out of the tin and decorate it. I used whipped cream (rice cream this time), some leftover crumbled biscuits, honeycomb chunks, orange pieces, and some chocolate buttons.
Miss Madeleine Bakes 