A Pumpkin Experiment

I have been meaning to blog about my pumpkin experiment all week. Sorry I haven't managed it until now.

Why pumpkins? I don't like waste and my colleague was just going to throw away her perfectly good pumpkins because she didn't get round to carving them for halloween. This, I decided, was a travesty. So I set myself the challenge to prove to her that two pumpkins could make a lot of food. Hence the pumpkin experiment was born. (I'm making it sound kind of epic... It's not)

 At this point I wasn't even sure I liked the taste of pumpkin. 

I had certainly never cooked with it. I searched the web for a recipes and settled on soup, cupcakes and roasted seeds.

First I made the soup.

I doubled all of the quantities because I had a huge amount of pumpkin to use!

I also added chilli and cumin seeds, I like a warming soup in Winter (Yes I have decided that it is winter) and if it turned out I didn't like the taste of pumpkin it would be masked by the spice.

I made enough for 5 portions. Unfortunately I didn't really like it. Jamie did though and we worked out it tasted much better with lots of cheese.

 Next I roasted the seeds, this was a huge success. and so easy. I just followed this recipe and Ta Da - a really yummy and semi healthy snack.

 Last I made the cupcakes. I followed a hummingbird bakery recipe for these and substituted pumpkin puree for mashed pumpkin. 

I decided in my wisdom to double the amount of pumpkin in the recipe because I had lots. (bad idea and worst reason ever) Unsurprisingly they turned out pretty dense.

 But they did taste nice, so not a complete disaster.

Challenge completed, I would definitely do it again and maybe play around with the soup flavour more and FOLLOW THE RECIPE for the cupcakes. How could I forget the first rule of baking so regularly. Oh well.