Holiday Lights - Laurel's Pumpkin Gingerbread Recipe

Laurel’s Pumpkin Gingerbread I was inspired to create a gingerbread using pumpkin several years ago, by a PBS series called “Footsteps”. Though the young woman in the  show, tricked her die-hard, non-vegetable eating brother-in-law into saying he liked vegetables when he ate her pumpkin gingerbread, I could never find a recipe for it. So I created one myself by changing the ingredients around in somebody elses. I love it and make it regularly for festive, winter holidays. It is also delicious topped with some Bosc Pears that have been cooked up with cinnamon and no or sugar or just a tiny bit of sugar. Bosc Pears, which we eat regularly in our fall salads along with crisp persimmons, get over the hill so easily since they are really only good fresh when they are crisp

 This is a major variation on a recipe in Cooking Light 11-12/94 (substituted pumpkin/squash for oil, substituted whole wheat flour and buttermilk for liquid))

Note: this is very tasty and better for you if you make it with whole wheat flour (more fiber in our diets – yeah!), but you can make it with regular all-purpose if that is all you have.

Mix up wet stuff well in one bowl. Measure up dry stuff in another. Combine bowl contents and get them thoroughly mixed, but don’t beat the results. Bake at 350 degrees. Cut into eight pieces. Each piece is probably about 190 calories.

I commonly double this recipe so that it fits into two round cake pan. This recipe is the SINGLE cake pan recipe. Spray the cake pans with good old PAM.

Wet Stuff: 1/2 cup buttermilk, 1/4 cup molasses, 1/4 cup cooked squash/plain canned pumpkin, 2 T honey, 1 egg white or 1/4 cup egg substitute

Dry Suff: 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup whole wheat (or white whole wheat) flour, 1 t powdered ginger, 1 t cinnamon, 3/4 t baking soda, 1/4 salt, 1 t cloves (If your baking soda is a little old, put it through one of those little hand strainers and grind the lumps through the mesh into the bowl)