Ten Posts of Pumpkin: (7) Pumpkin Cream Cheese Brownies

(My last repost, from exactly a year and a day ago.)

Are you ready for these? Because they are good. They are pumpkin plus chocolate plus cream cheese good.

It all started like this: as I began my pumpkin recipe quest, I started with one of my favorite food blogs, er - one of everyone's favorite food blogs - Smitten Kitchen. It didn't let me down. Deb, its hostess-with-the-mostest, had a Martha Stewart Living recipe for Pumpkin Swirl Brownies. They looked delicious. A big change from my previous ideas of what a pumpkiny dessert should be -- i.e. Beth's frosted pumpkin cookies and Alta Cafe's pumpkin bar back in the no-nuts-or-raisins days -- but still yummy-sounding. Deb stated the following in her blog, however: "[E]very time I try a bite of one, I find myself wishing they were either all pumpkin bars or all brownies. Oh, and I'd like either version to have a cream cheese swirl." Did this deter me from trying the recipe? Heck no at all. But it certainly inspired me to add a cream cheese swirl. So... marrying and adapting Deb's recipe + this recipe from David Lebovitz, I did just that. And then I ate almost the whole pan.

I know Thanksgiving is over and now we are shifting from pumpkin to peppermint... but maybe you can bookmark this page and make these next fall. Or maybe you can somehow add peppermint.

Here's me grating nutmeg with care:

Oh my heavens what a flattering photo!

(12/1/10 comment: I have a lot less hair and a lot more belly presently.)

Anyway.

Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin and Cream Cheese Swirled Brownies

Adapted (and quite improved!) from Smitten Kitchen

Yield: one 13X9" pan - about 20 good-sized brownies, more if you're a dainty eater

1 stick unsalted butter (8 ounces)

6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped

4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, chopped, or chocolate chips*

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon cayenne (optional, but nice)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

4 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 1/4 cup pureed pumpkin or canned pumpkin

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

8 ounces cream cheese (I only had 6 oz and it worked fine)

1 egg yolk

5 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

*I used a cayenne-orange spiced chocolate bar and it was perfect. But I'm sure chocolate chips would be good too in the event that you don't happen to have a cayenne-orange spiced chocolate bar lying around.

[NOTE: Because I was adding the cream cheese swirl and because the Smitten Kitchen notes said that even without the cream cheese swirl these brownies were really huge in an 8X8" pan, I used an 11X7" pan. Next time I will use 13X9" pan because they were still huge.]

1. Line a 13X9" pan with criss-crossed sheets of foil and butter the foil well. (Don't spray. BUTTER. It tastes so much better.) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Melt bittersweet chocolate and stick of butter in double boiler over simmering water, stirring occasionally until smooth.

3. Whisk together flour, baking powder, cayenne, and salt in large bowl and set aside. In separate bowl (your KitchenAid Mixer bowl if you have one), beat together brown sugar and eggs (adding one at a time) until fluffy. Add 1 T vanilla. Slowly beat in flour mixture.

4. Scoop two cups of this batter into a separate bowl and stir in chocolate-butter mixture. Once well-combined, add semisweet chocolate chunks or chips. Pour chocolate batter into pan.

5. Stir pumpkin, olive oil, cinnamon, and nutmeg into remaining batter. Once combined, pour on top of chocolate batter. Using the wide edge of a butter knife, swirl the batters together.

6. With hand-mixer, beat cream cheese, egg yolk, regular sugar and 1 t vanilla until well-combined. (Maybe your baby is sleeping at this point, and her bedroom is right next to the kitchen. Maybe you will learn that hand-mixers work just as well in the bathroom as they do in the kitchen. So do blenders, for that matter.) Spoon the cream cheese mixture on top of pumpkin batter in eight dollops. Using knife, swirl in same manner as above.

Pretty!

7. Bake 40-45 minutes (or a little less if you are like us and you like your brownies gooey).

8. Smile at your baby. Or my baby.*

(Goodness gracious, she's so much bigger than that now!)

9. Enjoy.

10. Share with your friends.

11. Tell your friends that your friend Edith-Nicole w/ a Child gave you this genius of a recipe.

*My baby looks a little more like this lately.

Ten Posts of Pumpkin: (6) Butternut Squash and Pinto Bean Enchiladas with Mole Sauce

This post has been hard to assemble because there are many parts, the pictures do not do the recipe justice, and, um, I can't seem to find my notes. I'll let you decide what to do with that little disclaimer.

But please note: these are as good and unique as they sound.

The best part is the mole sauce. If you aren't in a mood to make your own refried beans or peel and dice a butternut squash or grate an obscene amount of cheese, that's fine. But make the mole sauce. It's totally easy and it's the best mole sauce I've ever had and, while it involves a lot of ingredients, most of them are available at health food stores or co-ops or even some regular grocery stores in bulk and BULK IS CHEAP. Especially spices. The best part of my grocery shopping experience is when I pay 14 cents for fresh nutmeg. It's even more edifying when I happen to have caught a glimpse of the jars of nutmeg for sale three aisles down, which cost like $4+. Preposterous.

Okay. So first I'll give you the mole recipe, adapted (to be made nut-free and slightly simplified, i.e. I don't peel the chiles or tomatoes and I just blend everything together) from a David Lebovitz blog post, and after that I'll elaborate on the enchiladas. But seriously, if you don't feel like assembling enchiladas, just use the mole sauce with chips or poured over some poached chicken breasts or drizzled on rice and beans or WHATEVER. Just make it and eat it. It's spectacular.

Yum. I miss it.

Chocolate Mole Sauce

Adapted from David Lebovitz

Yield: about 2-3 cups

5 dried ancho chiles

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, thinly sliced

2 tomatoes, seeds squeezed out

1/3 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1/3 cup diced prunes (or raisins)

1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds

1/4 teaspoon each: cinnamon, cloves, oregano or epazote, cumin, coriander, allspice

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

1/8 teaspoon cayenne

1 cup warm water (or more, as needed, ideally reserved from soaking the ancho chiles)

1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted

Cover chiles with water in a saucepan and bring to boil. Turn off heat, submerge the chiles by setting a bowl on top of them, and let soak for 30 minutes or so.

Have all your spices and herbs ready to go in a small prep bowl.

In a skillet over medium heat, sauté the chopped onion in the olive oil until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and sauté another minute. Add spices and herbs and cook, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds. Remove from heat and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, drain the ancho chiles and reserve the cooking water. Remove the seeds and stems from the chiles.

Using a food processor, or if you are lucky enough to have one, your Vita-Mix or another comparably awesome blender, purée the ancho chiles with the cooked onion-garlic-spice mixture, coconut, tomatoes, prunes (or raisins), sesame seeds, salt, and pepper, adding cooking water 1/4 cup at a time until the mixture is smooth. It might take a couple minutes and about 1 1/2 cups of water, but mine came together beautifully, and rather easily. Taste the mixture and add more salt or pepper as desired. Stir in the melted chocolate and add a little more water to obtain a smooth, saucy consistency. Store in the refrigerator until ready to use.

And now for the enchiladas...

This makes kind of a weird quantity, because I was making it all up as I went along. I believe it would make one 15X9" pan's worth of either properly rolled enchiladas or enchiladas layered, casserole-style. But what I ended up with was a 9X9" pan of rolled enchiladas, and a 13X9" pan of "enchilada casserole".

Butternut Squash and Pinto Bean Enchiladas with Mole Sauce

From Yours Truly

Yield: about 8 servings (see above)

1 butternut squash or other winter squash, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes (you'll want about 1.5 lbs flesh)

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

12-16 small corn tortillas

2-3 cups Mexican Whole Beans or Refried Beans or some sort of canned equivalent (about two 15-oz cans)

1 recipe mole sauce

3 cups shredded monterey jack cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together chili powder, cumin and salt. Spread butternut squash onto baking sheet or roasting pan and toss with spice mixture and olive oil. Roast until starting to brown, about 20-30 minutes.

Once squash is cooked and cool enough to handle, assemble your enchiladas.

To make layered enchiladas (the easy thing to do), layer 4-6 tortillas in glass baking dish, followed by half the beans, half the squash, and a third of the cheese. Repeat layers again, starting with tortillas and ending with cheese. Add one more layer of tortillas, pour mole sauce evenly on top of tortillas, and finish with a sprinkling of the final third of cheese. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until everything is bubbling a bit and the cheese is starting to brown.

To make rolled enchiladas, first warm the tortillas in the microwave or on the stove so that they can be rolled without breaking. Fill each tortilla with about 1/4 cup beans and 1/4 cup squash, roll the tortilla tightly and place in pan, so that they are all side by side and there is very little space anywhere in the pan at the end. Pour the mole sauce evenly on top, followed by the cheese. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until everything is bubbling a bit and the cheese is starting to brown.

Enjoy!

Ten Posts of Pumpkin: (5) Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins

I am so going to fail. I tried! But then I ended up on a plane. With a baby. And a nice helpful grandmother who cared for her while I added "stranger/grandmother" to my list of things to be thankful for. And then there were the friends! With their lasagnas and trips to the park and Starbucks beverages and nuptials. And I had a dance card to fill, a bride to dote on, a family-size portion of warm apple crostada to consume all by myself, a Hwy 5 to tackle, and a toddler to keep tabs of (sort of - as soon as we parted ways with stranger/grandmother we had aforementioned friends and subsequently a real grandmother to do my dirty work). Then there was Aptos and siblings and nephews and Thanksgiving and Scrabble and homemade brioche and cinnamon rolls and the best stuffing on earth and endless food, food, everywhere you turn, food! I have been too busy digesting to actually WRITE about food! Oh, also, I forgot my computer.

The worst part is that I actually made and documented all my pumpkins-a-plenty creations. I just haven't had an opportunity to sit down and put it all together into a useful, aesthetically acceptable format.

So about those muffins...

that I made like a month ago...

with my homemade pumpkin puree...



after I ate a pumpkin-cranberry muffin at a coffee shop and fell in love with its moderate sugar content and bursts of juicy warm fresh cranberries...

and of course felt I had to make them myself...

and try out the mess-free-trick I'd read about elsewhere on the internets...



They're good. Really good. Not too sweet. Not too spicy. Just perfectly pumpkiny with a tart bite. I made muffins as well as a loaf and the loaf is in my freezer in Minneapolis and as I write and reflect on these little treasures, I mostly can't wait to get home, thaw the loaf, and dig in.



Probably because I am wasting away here at the Lenz house, where it's just really hard to find something to eat.




Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins
From Bon Appétit, November 1995
Yield: 24 muffins or two regular-sized loaves (I made 12 muffins + 1 loaf)

2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
2/3 cup grapeseed or other mild oil
3 large eggs
1 pound pumpkin puree (equivalent of 16-ounce can solid pack pumpkin)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries (or an 8- or 10-ounce bag frozen cranberries)

Optional cinnamon sugar topping: 4 tablespoons sugar + 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour loaf or muffin pans.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together dry ingredients, not including brown sugar. In a large mixing bowl, beat together brown sugar and oil. Add eggs, one at a time, then pumpkin puree and vanilla. Beat until incorporated. With electric mixer turned off if that's what you're using, carefully pour in the dry ingredients. Cover top of bowl and mixing attachment with a kitchen towel and mix on low speed until the messy puff of flour smoke has dissipated (about 20 seconds or so). Move the towel and mix on low until just combined. Stir in the cranberries. Pour batter into loaf pans or spoon into muffin tins (make muffin cups about two-thirds full). Top with cinnamon-sugar mixture, if using. Bake until tester inserted in center comes out clean, rotating about half way through, for a total of about 60-70 minutes for loaves and 18-22 minutes for muffins.*

*Confession about baking times: Because my oven does not cook especially evenly on the regular "bake" setting, I actually used the "convection bake" setting and baked the muffins at 325 degrees for 16 minutes, rotating pan halfway through. The loaf took about an hour with same setting and temp. The temp/time listed above are from Epicurious, a far more trustworthy site than my own. But then, they probably have more reliable ovens in their test kitchens.

Ten Posts of Pumpkin: (4) Gingery Lemony Pumpkin Soup

I just want to mention, before I get to the soup, that I made those pumpkin blondies again this weekend for a bridal shower and they were (a) even better than I remembered and (b) quite popular. I'm also going to go ahead and be a bit of a critic and advise you to not, under any circumstances, make this dessert. I read the sketchy comments and defied the warnings, because it sounded so interesting. Please learn from my mistake. Interesting doesn't cut it when you are trying to impress 20 semi-strangers. Comments are meaningful. I should have listened. I should have known that, when a recipe is followed by a slew of comments dotted with words like "weird" and "disappointing", it is not worthy of experimentation. Particularly right before a party. Particularly when it involves several expensive ingredients. Seriously. Three-quarters of that cake went in the rubbish bin, people. Thank heavens I had pumpkin blondies and a fabulous pear cake (with chunks of bittersweet chocolate) to offer as well.

And now: soup. This soup is so great and easy and simultaneously refreshing and fallesque! It's adapted from a recipe for carrot soup that Charlotte made for me and my family a month or two ago. The carrot soup was great but I had winter squash to use up when I next craved the soup... and an even swap worked beautifully. It was in fact even a little creamier and smoother than the carrot version, likely because winter squash is so much softer than carrots.

This is a forgiving recipe, as soup recipes often are. Fresh lemon zest is about the only super important, inflexible component. I used jarred ginger when I made this, a random assortment of onion-types that were on my counter, and I added a little curry because I love curry. I suspect that sweet potatoes would work just as nicely in this soup as the carrots and winter squash did.

We enjoyed it with some homemade seedy soda bread and a sprinkling of red salt. It's really a nice soup and it makes a manageable amount - something I appreciate as fall approaches, my freezer continues to be full, and my daughter fails to appreciate the wonders of soup. My husband and I ate it for dinner, had seconds, and had one lunch portion left over.

Gingery Lemony Pumpkin Soup

Adapted from this carrot soup recipe

Yield: 4 servings

3 tablespoons butter or olive oil

1 1/2 cup chopped onion (any kind of onion)

1 tablespoon fresh minced ginger

3 cloves garlic, sliced

1 1/2 pounds pumpkin or other winter squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/2" pieces*

1 tablespoon tomato paste (or 1 or 2 fresh tomatoes)

1 teaspoon curry (optional; I used muchi curry, which is semi-sweet)

zest and juice of one lemon

3 cups vegetable or chicken broth

Melt butter or olive oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion; sauté 4 minutes. Add ginger and garlic; sauté 2 minutes. Add winter squash, tomato paste (or tomatoes), curry (if using), and lemon peel; sauté 1 minute. Add 3 cups broth and bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover partially and simmer until squash is very tender and flavors marry, about 12-15 minutes. Puree soup with immersion blender or in batches using a regular blender. (If doing the latter, allow the soup to cool slightly and return to pot after blending.) Gently stir in lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper. Add a bit of water or more broth if you want a thinner soup. Bring to a simmer again. Serve in big bowls and, if possible, devour slowly next to a warm fireplace while it is raining or snowing outside.

Can be made 1 or 2 days ahead. Cover and chill.

*The first time I made this, I used the long, tubular part of a medium-sized butternut squash and that equaled about 1.5 lbs. The second time, I used a delicata squash (unpeeled) and an acorn squash (peeled). Both times, the soup was great.