No Bake Pumpkin Cheesecake-Soup

Or, squeeze your pumpkins!

The last of my pumpkin dishes from Saturday - and the whole raison d'etre for even getting a humongo pumpkin in the first place - was a pumpkin cheesecake. Which sort of became a pumpkin-flavoured cream cheese soup But it was still tasty anyway (thanks to the addition of a WHOLE tin of condensed milk) which is really all that counts.

I may have mentioned earlier this week that I'd steamed the pumpkin for about half an hour, to ensure the flesh got soft enough for mashing. The problem with steaming, though, is that the pumpkin flesh gets a little too watery. And since I was soooooo eager for cheesecake (piggy!) I didn't bother trying to spend ages squeezing all the liquid out of the streamed pumpkin - which resulted in a sloppy yellow-tinged mush that never set. We're eating it with a spoon anyway, it's still yummy.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's the incredibly easy recipe for no-bake pumpkin cheesecake.

Ingredients

Base:

1/2 pack of plain HobNobs (or similar digestive biscuits)

1/2 pack of dark chocolate Hobnobs (or similar)

100gms of butter

Filling

600gms cream cheese

1/2 large pumpkin (steamed, mashed and DRAINED)

400gms sweetened condensed milk

Crush the plain HobNobs into fine crumbs (you may find it easier to do this with a food processor, but I just used my hands. My strong, powerful hands.) You can leave the dark chocolate HobNobs as bigger, rougher crumbs so you get more chocolatey bits to bite into. Place the biscuit crumbs into a springform cake tin.

Melt the butter and mix it through the biscuit crumbs to bind them together. Use more butter if the crumbs don't stick together properly. Now's not the time to be worrying about your expanding waistline. Use the bottom of a spoon to press the mixture down into the tin.

Mix the cream cheese, pumpkin mash and condensed milk together (either with a spoon, or a food processor). Pour the deliciousness into the springform tin, on top of the biscuit mixture. Pop into the fridge and let it set for at least 3 hours, preferably overnight.

Enjoy!

SOS (Save Our Seeds!)

While I didn't go to a Halloween party this year, I did try to acknowledge the day by buying a pumpkin. The idea was to make a pumpkin cheesecake (more on that later) but after butchering the pumpkin so I could steam its flesh, I also ended up with quite a few pumpkin seeds. And since I'm loathe to let things go to waste, I decided to roast the seeds instead of chucking them. It's really simple to do, and the seeds make a tasty beer snack.

Once you've scooped all the seeds out of the pumpkin, try and get rid of as much of the stringy pulp as you can. I did this by placing the seeds into a bowl full of water, and picking out the pulp by hand. It doesn't take much time. After you've cleaned the seeds up, place them on a tray or plate to dry for at least half an hour.

When the seeds are fairly dry, start preheating the oven on a low heat - I set mine to 120 degrees Celsius. Place the pumpkin seeds on a baking tray covered with baking paper. Melt a knob of unsalted butter and  pour it over the seeds, coating them evenly. (And if you're microwaving the butter to melt it, please make sure you keep an eye on it or cover it with sometime, or else it explodes all over your microwave and you end up having to clean the greasy bits up. I got my poppet to help me with melting the butter, so he wouldn't feel left out, and that's exactly what happened. Thrice. Because he never learns from his mistakes.)

Add about a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of dried garlic flakes to the buttery seeds, then pop them into the oven to roast for about 30 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don't get burnt, and remove them when they get golden-brown. Once they get cool enough to handle, they're ready to be eaten!

Although I used salt and garlic (you can use fresh minced garlic too, by the way, I just didn't have any), you can adapt the recipe to make a sweet version too. Just be sure to use unsalted butter, and substitute the savoury flavourings for something sweet, like cinnamon and some honey, maybe?

I also made some pumpkin biscuits and a pumpkin cheesecake that night, so check back here soon for the other recipes!

Ladies Courtyard Picnic

What do a bunch of unemployed girls do on a hot summer's day?

Well, they get together, dress like ladies, and sit around a courtyard eating dessert all day!

To celebrate our liberation from the shackles of working for 'Tha Man', Jojo, Googy and I hit upon the idea of organising a Ladies Courtyard Picnic (for unemployed ladies and gents only!). The plan was for us to eat lots of sweet things, drink some G&Ts (mumma's little helper...) and bake more sweet things.

Instead of baking Satan cakes like we usually do, Googy and I decided to try something new. Now that we're unemployed, we can bake anything we feel like baking...even things we've never actually tasted before! That's how you live life on the edge. Not being from North America and having never celebrated Thanksgiving before, neither of us had ever had a pumpkin pie. I mean, pumpkin is meant to be a savoury food, isn't it?

So we googled some recipes and pictures, and it turned out to be fairly easy to make. The first picture we found also made it look really, really disgustingly tasty. Like, so tasty but so sweet that your tongue would shrivel up and fall out. That sealed the deal for me - we would be making pumpkin pie. And, just to add a little more excitement to our lives, we decided to mix things up a bit by substituting half the pumpkin goo with sweet potato goo.

On the day of the picnic, Googy and I decided to ride to Jojo's. But on the way there, we stopped off to see the Tree Man.
There he is, in the background, sitting beside me. It's a shit photo, I'll try and get a better one the next time I go past him.

By the time Googy and I got to Jojo's, we were both sticky and sweaty and stinky from riding. Not very ladylike at all, I'm afraid. But at least I rode wearing a nice dress and headscarf. That always makes up for sweaty, sticky, stinkiness. Plus, I also had a nice little apron that I'd made the day before. All very ladylike (except for the charging-madly-around-town-on-a-BMX bit).
We were greeted by Jojo and Phoebe, and presented with a MOUNTAIN of baked goods - chocolate chip cookies, raspberry and white chocolate muffins, and shortbread. And also some smoked salmon sandwiches and very tasty curried egg sandwiches (yum...curried egg fart...).
After munching through a sizeable portion of the baked goods mountain, we thought it might be a good time to start flexing our muscles. Isn't that what all good ladies do after lunch? Then it was time to for pumpkin and sweet potato pie goodness. And sweetbabyjesus...was it good!

Here are some photos of the goodness, freshly unleashed from the oven. Also some photos of us in the kitchen looking happy and successful and greedy. Mainly greedy.
See that mountain of pumpkin pie? It's still sitting in my fridge. We made way too much. If anyone wants some, get in touch and I'll pass the tastiness on to you. Or you can just make it yourself. It's so easy I won't even post instructions or a recipe.