Pumpkin chocolate muffins

We arrived home on Thursday from a wonderful holiday on the Greek island of Symi.  The need to dig out winter coats, hats, scarves and boots so we could take Doug the Pug for a walk, and one day back in a grey office on Friday left me with serious post-holiday blues!  This morning I decided the only way to cope was to embrace the onset of autumn with some baking – pumpkin muffins choc full of dark chocolate chunks.  These definitely put a smile back on my face!

Spiced pumpkin cake with salted caramel cream cheese frosting and coconut cream dark chocolate ganache

I've been wanting to try this cake for ages now and have even had a tin of pumpkin purée and a tin of caramel sitting in the pantry waiting for their chance to be whipped up into a cake layered with chocolate ganache.  But for a cake like this with lots of ingredients and layers and two different icings, I need a special occasion as a good excuse to make it. When we were invited to a barbecue for a friend's birthday today I knew this was the perfect opportunity to have a go at it. 

The cake itself was utterly delicious - delicately spiced and moist like a really good carrot cake, which of course always goes perfectly with cream cheese frosting, but this time, cranked up a gear by adding caramel and sea salt to the frosting. I also made use of my recent discovery of dividing a chilled can of coconut milk, using the liquid as a milk substitute in the cake batter for added flavour, then melting the solidified cream with dark chocolate to make the most amazing ganache you've ever tasted. To maximise the amount of ganache and frosting, I sliced each cake in two, so that when the cake was cut, it revealed stripes of four layers of orange pumpkin, caramel cream and rich dark chocolate. 

However, I hadn't quite thought how suitable a cake with so much frosting would be to make - and transport - in the middle of a heatwave! Determined not to be deterred (honestly, I've been dreaming about this cake!) I devised an ingenious travel solution - a big, clear plastic box with a layer of bags of ice which I wedged around the trunk of the cake stand, acting as both a cool box and a way of keeping it wobble-free. It worked - and will from now on be my default way of transporting cakes!

Pumpkin seed and herb bread rolls

For hallowe'en I created these delicious herby, pumpkin seed bread rolls. I made a pumpkin and almond soup served in baked pumpkin shells, with a gingery glass of dark and stormy.

Pumpkin apricot and orange cake

A proper hallowe'en recipe this one - roasted pumpkin and soaked dried apricots are puréed with clementine juice to form the basis of this cake, drizzled with fresh orange juice when baked and then topped with zesty orange mascarpone icing.  There was loads of roasted pumpkin left over too, so I turned it into a pumpkin soup, and roasted the seeds with salt, pepper, paprika and olive oil to serve instead of croutons.  Happy hallowe'en!