Ive been feeling a bit rubbish lately, my back has been giving me gyp and my tummy has been unwell too. Now while this is great for the weight loss, its not great for the general sense of wellbeing and happiness so this morning I decided to cheer myself up. It’s wet and miserable here right now, the rain is hammering down and its pretty windy too so Rik lit the ESSE - our wonderful, ever faithful solid fuel range cooker and I logged onto Pinterest.
Those of you who know me know how much I love Pinterest and have used it as an inspiration for many things since it first started way back, years ago. For those of you who don’t know, Pinterest its a site where you can search for inspiration on many, many, many topics and keep the things you like on virtual pin boards for use later, at least that’s how I use it. I have found some incredible stuff, some things I will never use but others have proved invaluable and my homemade offshoots can be found all around our Quinta as well as my pantry and kitchen table! I decided that a pumpkin cake would be a good way to cheer up, real comfort food and I just happen to have a nice little pumpkin patch here so I went and picked one of my little orange beauties.
I then found a lovely recipe on Pinterest here at, wait for it…… Cosycakes Cottage!! What a perfect sounding name, doesn’t it just make you want to bake bad, naughty, tasty and delicious cakes? So I got to work, cutting and de-seeding half the pumpkin and put it on a baking tray in our ESSE which was roaring away nicely. Roast for one hour the recipe said so while I was waiting I turned the other half into a pumpkin and coconut soup for lunch, it was really good, sorry no pictures as Rik and I ate it too fast - ho hum. The soup recipe is from BudgetBytes (again on Pinterest just click the link) and was very easy as well as creamy and delicious. Im sure it would work equally well with butternut squash or sweet potato too, so also very versatile.
The cake……
Well it was perfect, it came out really well, exactly as the description moist, soft and tastes scrumptious, I will definitely be putting back that lost 4lbs in no time!
Then, just as I finished icing the cake, the sun came out and the day ended with blue skies overhead. I can definitely confirm spicy pumpkin cake and sunshine is all one needs to make a wet miserable day go away!