[Debbie]

Have had a request to post this recipe which I discovered a week or so ago. Made a cake up last week and it was fabulous!! Sorry, no ounces or farenheit.

Here goes...

Pain d'Epice a la Courge

Ingredients
250mls good tasting olive oil
250g good tasting honey
400g sugar
560g flour
4 lightly beaten whole eggs
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cloves ground
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg ground
2 teaspoons cinnamon
400g grated raw pumpkin
180g chopped nuts

Method
Mix well the oil, honey, sugar and eggs in a large bowl.
In another bowl roughly mix the dry ingredients - except nuts
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients
Add nuts and mix till distributed, but do not overmix
Pour into very well buttered loaf tins (will fill two of them or one large square tin)

Cook 1h 15mins at 225degees C

Remove from oven when cooked and leave in the tin for 10 mins before removing to a cake cooling rack.

Freezes exceptionally well and keeps in the fridge for a week or so (not that we know as the bits in the fridge are loooong gone )

I used a "courge muscade de provence" for the pumpkin. Any hard ripe pumpkin should do the job though.

My husband is not a fan of cinnamon, so I swapped the spices they say for the same equivelant quantity of fresh grated nutmeg, ground ginger and all spice.

As I am on a low salt diet (no salt actually) I just put a pinch of fleur de sel in. The flavour of this salt is stronger and so I figured that if it was for flavour it would work just as well.

It doesn't say whether to use white sugar or what... so I thought dark brown sugar might be nice with the pumkin. I was right!!

The recipe does not say what flour to use, so I used a normal flour. This cake is a very heavy one so I did not think that self raising was the way to go here.

Not having a normal grater, I whizzed the pumpkin in the food processor till it was in fine shreds. Worked well. You could probably cut it fine if you had to, or use a potato peeler and peel strips of pumpkin to then chop.

It is a heavy textured cake, which is absolutely delicious and is not overpoweringly "pumpkiny". You have a hint of the sweetness and flavour of the pumpkin, but there is also a definate honey/spice taste.

We ate it warm with cold creme fraische, but I imagine it would be divine with thick egg custard which is what I am going to serve it with next time..

Enjoy, but don't blame me for the addiction...
_________________
If you cannot feel your arteries hardening, eat more cheese. If you can, drink more red wine. Diet is just "die" with a "t" on the end. Exercise is walking into the kitchen.

[David]

Sounds wonderful--I've printed this one off! What kind of pumpkin did you use Donna? Would something like a butternut squash work? Or must it be more Hallowe'en pumpkinish?
_________________
Vivant Linguae Mortuae!!