Baking Advent Calendar day 11

For Baking Advent Calendar Day 11 I’ve been into what is relatively unchartered territory for me. My partner recently acquired The New Vegan by Aine Carlin and has been trying to persuade me to cook something from it. To be honest I didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm , but when she pointed out that the book contains baking recipes as well I thought now was the time to take the plunge. I did do a vegan bake to tie in with the vegan week that they had in last years Great British Bake Off but that’s as far as my experience goes. The bake that I opted for today is a spiced molasses bundt bread and it’s currently on a cooling rack in my kitchen. If it tastes as good as it smells I think I might have found a  winner.

If you look at the list of ingredients below you’ll see that I didn’t make life easy for myself with this. I like to think that I have a fairly well stocked pantry but it did need a shopping expedition to get some buckwheat flour and blackstrap molasses before I could bake. The second of those items was completely new to me. Apparently it’s a byproduct of sugar cane refining and is only 45% sugar content as opposed to 70% for ordinary molasses. Another unusual ingredient is butternut squash but we did already have one of those in the fridge that needed using up.

Ingredients

• 170g plain flour
• 90g buckwheat flour
• 150g light brown sugar
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 0.5 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 1tsp ground cinnamon
• 1tsp allspice
• 0.5tsp of grated nutmeg
• 0.5tsp ground ginger
• 200g butternut squash puree
• 60ml olive oil
• 60ml blackstrap molasses
• 1 tsp vanilla extract.

Method

• To make the puree. Heat the oven to gas mark 6. Cut the butternut squash in half and remove the seeds. Place each half of the squash flesh side down on a baking tray. Add a little water, cover with tin foil and bake for an hour. After removing from the oven leave to cool until the squash can be handled, then spoon out the soft baked flesh. Place the flesh in a blender and blitz to a soft puree.
• After making the puree set the oven to gas mark 3 and grease the bundt tin that you are going to use.
• Stir the flours, bicarb, baking powder, salt and spices in a large bowl.
• In a separate bowl whisk the puree, oil, molasses, vanilla and 60ml of water until smooth.
• Add the wet ingredients to the dry and gently fold in.
• Place in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
• Leave to cool for 10 minutes then turn out of the tin