No-Bake Ginger Pumpkin Pie

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no-bake pumpkin pie, pumpkin, pumpkin desserts, pumpkin pie, roasted pumpkin, Thanksgiving desserts

For the first time ever, the girls grew their very own pumpkins this year. Emma was quite successful with her bounty: 2 large pumpkins and a medium one.  Charlotte, just 3 wee little ones.  No matter, they were quite excited and decorated them for Halloween.  I asked to keep one for roasting.

We love roasted pumpkin seeds.  I usually just toss them with olive oil and salt, then pop them in the oven.  This time, I thought I’d try something different.  My friend Marina had come over for scones a few days earlier and brought me a gift.  A foodie gift.  Pimentón.

Pimentón is a Spanish version of paprika with a wonderful smoky flavour to it. An essential ingredient in Spanish cuisine, it’s what gives chorizo its distinct flavour.  I use it to flavour my chicken when making fajitas, or beef when making tacos.  I even blend into my mayo and dip my fries into it.  Its use is limitless.  I love it!  And that gorgeous colour, oh!  My daughter Charlotte took these to school for snack one day and her friends devoured them.  They even asked if I would share the recipe.  So here you go girls, this one is for you, The Pumpkin Seeds Girls at Villa Maria High School.  Place the seeds in an oven pan, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle some sea salt and pimentón, and give them a toss.  Roast in the oven at 350 F, until lightly browned, about 30 minutes.  Enjoy!

Now for roasting the pumpkin.  I cut it into pieces and peeled them.  I threw them into a roasting pan and then into a 350 F oven, until fork tender. Once cooled, I stored it in the fridge until I was ready to use it.

Not having made my pumpkin pie for our Canadian Thanksgiving, much to Emma and my nephew’s disappointment, I thought I’d make it with the roasted pumpkin.  I’ve only ever used canned pumpkin, so this was a first.  I love this pumpkin pie.  Instead of using the typical graham cracker crust, I make it with ginger snap cookies.  It gives the pie a wonderfully warm flavour.  And it’s ready in a snap, no baking involved!

Ginger Pumpkin Pie

2 cups of ginger snap cookie crumbs, about 250 gr. of ginger snaps

1/4 cup of melted butter

3/4 cups of brown sugar

1 package of unflavoured gelatin

1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon of salt

1/4 teaspoon of powdered ginger

1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg

2 cups/400 gr. of roasted pumpkin, pureed, or a 14 oz. can of pumpkin

3/4 cups of milk

3 egg yolks

1/2 cup of 35% whipping cream

Place the ginger snap cookies in a food processor and blitz until they turn into fine crumbs.  Add the melted butter and mix with your fingers. Press the crumbs onto the bottom and sides of a 9-inch/1.5 L deep pie plate. Refrigerate until ready to use.

In a saucepan, stir together brown sugar, gelatin, salt and all of the spices. Blend in the pumpkin, milk and egg yolks.  If you’ve forgotten to puree the pumpkin into a smooth texture, as I did, you can use a hand blender in the saucepan to do so now.  Over medium heat, bring to a boil and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.  Set the pan in an ice water bath in the kitchen sink.  Allow to cool.

In a small bowl, whip the cream until thick.  Whisk 1/4 of the whipped cream into the pumpkin mixture.  Fold in the remaining whipped cream.  Pour into the pie crust and refrigerate for 4 hours, or overnight.  I like to decorate my pie with additional whipped cream and ginger snaps.  Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

Scones & Clotted Cream

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Annabelle White, buttermilk scones, clotted cream, cream, scones, the great scone debate

My friend Karen was celebrating a birthday and I wanted to do something special for her.  Seeing as she is a huge fan of everything British, I planned a morning of tea, scones, jam and clotted cream.  Coming across clotted cream around here isn’t an easy task, and is quite expensive if you do.  As Karen stepped into my kitchen and saw the freshly baked scones, she teasingly asked, “And where’s the clotted cream?”.  To which I replied, “It’s in the fridge, but I’m not sure it’s ready… I’ve never had it before.”  Astonished, Karen replied that she was only joking.  Well, clearly I wasn’t.

After much perusing of various scone recipes, I settled on one from the New Zealand Women’s Weekly.  Why?  One look at this video and you’ll understand.  Annabelle White is so enthusiastic and excited about these scones, she is over-the-top cute!  I fell in love with her!  Oh, and the fact that these scones looked oh so fast and simple to make.  Or perhaps it’s the kiwi accent!

The original recipe can be found here, but I altered it by omitting the dried fruit and adding 1/4 of sugar instead.

Ingredients

• 3 cups of self-raising flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 80g of semi-frozen butter
• 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk
• 1/4 cup of sugar

The trick to baking these scones, apparently, is using frozen butter and grating it into the flour, and handling the dough as little as possible with your hands, using a knife to mix all the ingredients together.  The knife saves overworking the gluten and produces a lighter scone.  It makes a rather wet dough, but that is exactly what’s got Annabelle so excited!

Preheat the oven to 400 F.  And in case you’re wondering what fan bake means, it’s convection bake.

Stir the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl, using a knife.  Grate in the frozen butter and work it into the mixture with the knife until it’s mixed in. Don’t overwork it. The colder the butter remains, the better.

Add the buttermilk and sugar and continue to stir with the knife.  Keep the mixture wet, so add a little more buttermilk if necessary, just 1 or 2 tablespoons.

Place the mixture on a lightly floured surface and gently pat it into an oval shape, with just 5 or 6 pats in total.  Using a pastry scrapper if you have one, a sharp knife if you don’t, cut the dough into 15 pieces.  Place them on a baking tray, close together.

Bake at 400 F for 10 to 15 minutes, or until golden.  Oh so scrumptious, no?

Clotted Cream and the Great Scone Debate

“Oh clotted cream, why do you baffle me so?”    Oh Lidia

And now for the celebrated clotted cream.  Apparently, it isn’t so easy to make at home.  So they said.  You need to use unpasteurized heavy cream. Unpasteurized cream or milk is non-existant here in Montreal, unless you own a cow.  Which I don’t.  And you also need to use a high fat heavy cream.  40% fat content is good, 50% is better.  The highest fat cream available to us is a mere 35%.  So, against all odds, I went ahead and made it.  And make it I did.  Oh yeah!  Lusciously yummy!

Preheat the oven to 200 F.  Pour 2 cups of 35% cream into an oven dish with a lid.  I read that it needed to be in the oven for 8 hours.  I didn’t read the part that said to leave it in there for an additional 4 hours if it hadn’t thickened.  So after 8 hours, or at 10:30 PM, I had to learn how to set my oven so it would turn itself off at 2:30 AM.  Only it beeps to let you know that the oven has shut itself off.  And keeps on beeping.  Until hubby nudges me at 2:45 AM and says that something is beeping in the kitchen.  Oh Karen, I hope you appreciated that clotted cream!  After 12 hours, remove the dish from the oven and allow to cool before placing in the fridge for 8 hours.  The cream is now clotted, if you’re lucky.  Remove the clotted cream carefully, not including the liquid cream on the bottom which you can use as regular cream. Transfer to a glass container.

Who would have thunk that this oh so luscious cream could spark a national debate over in the UK?  Well, it has!  The great debate is thus:  Do you spread the jam over your scone first and add a dollop of clotted cream on top?  Or do you spread the clotted cream over your scone and slather the jam over it? Hmmmm.  Unbelievable the amount of readings one can find on this.  In The Guardian.  The Telegraph.  Even The Independent.  Apparently, it’s a long-running rivalry between Cornwall, who claims it’s jam first with the clotted cream on top, and Devon, who insists it’s cream first with jam on top.  There’s actually a mathematician from the University of Sheffield who’s claim to fame is having proved which is the correct way.  Except that in The Telegraph she claims that it’s jam first.  And the very next day on ShortList.com, she insists it’s cream first.  Well, I just had to do my very own test, didn’t I?  So I tried my scone with jam first and the cream on top.  Yum!  Then I tried it with cream first and the jam on top.  Just as yum!  Maybe I needed to try again.  I did, with the same results.  So now I’m asking you my friends, how do you like your scones?

With the jam slathered on first and the clotted cream sitting on top?

Or with the clotted cream spread onto the scone and the jam dolloped over it?

And as I notice the time, I realize it is my birthday!  Happy Birthday to me! xo

Nutella Banana Bread… I Think

Tags

banana bread, nutella, Nutella and bananas, Nutella bread

I have been doing some much-needed cleaning around my home.  Not so much cleaning as organizing.  Oh, the stuff I put aside, you wouldn’t even begin to imagine.  And when we’re expecting guests and there are little piles of stuff everywhere, chances are I’ll run out of time to get to them so I just dump them.  In closets, grocery bags, armoires.  And then I scramble when searching where the heck I could have placed my driver’s permit renewal form.  Or worse, my over-due property taxes!

I came across piles of recipes.  Pages torn out of magazines while at the doctor’s office.  Photocopies from borrowed books.  Scraps of paper with notes on various recipes.  And sheets of paper with scribbles on it, listing ingredients and some form of method, but nothing else.  Such as this one.

I have no idea where it came from or what it’s called, but the fact that Nutella is present, well, I just had to try it.  You all know of my love affair with Nutella.  You could read more on that here.  From the ingredient list, this is definitely a banana bread with Nutella.  I’m thinking it’s from a European magazine or show because the measured ingredients are in grams, and because of the German flour #405.  I had to look that one up.  It’s our version of pastry flour.  And no electrical appliances either.  Or at least none that I wrote down.  All hand-mixed, it seems.  The result?  Oh, sweet Nutella-banana goodness!  Hmm, maybe I should rename this bread!

Ingredients

200 gr. of pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon of baking soda

1/2 teaspoon of salt

120 gr. golden caster sugar

50 gr. butter, softened

3 ripe bananas

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

150 gr. of yogurt

100 gr. of Nutella

1 banana, peeled & sliced

1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon & sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Butter and flour a loaf pan.

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl.  In a separate bowl, stir together the butter and sugar until well mixed.  Add in the bananas and mash with a fork.  Add eggs, vanilla and yogurt, and mix well.  Stir in the flour mixture and mix until just combined.  Pour batter into prepared pan.

Warm the Nutella, bain-marie style, the bowl with Nutella in a larger bowl of hot water, until it reaches a runny consistency.  Spread the Nutella on top of batter and swirl the batter to create a marble effect.

Peel and slice the remaining banana and place the slices over the top of the batter.  Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.  Bake for 55 to 60 minutes.  Cool in pan and you’re ready to dig in.  Enjoy!