Pumpkin Cake
BANANA OR PUMPKIN CAKE
Gluten Free, alternative sweeteners, ancient grains.
I am so excited to share this timeless Winter recipe with you all!
After going to Smitten Kitchen’s new book launch here in Austin and listening to Deb Perelman’s story and reading her rock star recipes, I was inspired to create a recipe that is the one you are dying to make immediately!
Even if pumpkin season is over.. I still wanted to create a cake that could be made with banana or pumpkin puree and would be a timeless recipe for generations. I know that is ambitious. When I started to develop recipes for The Teff Company, I fell in love with their Ivory Teff flour: and have made some of my best brownies using their teff flour, 2 granolas and a basic pound cake.
Then I became obsessed with banana breads and pumpkin cakes and started baking batch after batch to create a gluten free cake that highlighted the ancient grains and the power horse nutrient dense benefits of Teff. The goal was to develop a cake with a high inclusion of Teff that resulted in a moist cake without using complicated flours (no starches, no high glycemic flours either) and you could get all the ingredients in the supermarket and that really stood out as a piece de resistance.
I started to explore how Teff worked in baking (in a high inclusion) and how to combine it with which flours (alone it doesn’t bake so well) and I discovered through reading recipes online and comparing teff to quinoa (they bake similarly) that if you use half teff and half almond flour it works amazingly well, the texture is very smooth and it binds so well. Teff needs moisture and almond flour is the binding agent here. So the PRO tip here is substitute the flour in your recipes using ½ teff flour and ½ almond flour.
This cake only gets better with time! Feel free to serve the cake with cranberry sauce or even Lingonberry jam from IKEA!
Note: this is a sponsored blog post. All opinions are my own.
- ¾ cup Maskal Teff Ivory flour
- ¾ cup blanched almond flour such as Trader Joes
- 1 ½ tsp baking powder such as Rumford (at high altitude use half)
- ½ tsp baking soda (at high altitude use half)
- 1 tbsp ground Ceylon cinnamon (for banana bread) sub for Pumpkin pie spice for pumpkin cake
- ¾ tsp fine sea salt (I like salt in baking and it really is an important element in potentializing flavors)
- 1 cup Stir Sweetener
- ⅓ cup Sugar 2.0 or cane sugar (note: for banana cake you may want to reduce the sugar to ¼ cup)
- 1 cup extra virgin olive oil (I love California Every Day Olive Oil)
- 1 cup banana puree or canned pumpkin purée or homemade squash purée (kabocha or butternut squash: see notes below)
- 3 eggs
- Zest of 1 orange or zest of 2 lemons if making banana cake
- Optional add in: ¾ cup chocolate 70 %, finely chopped or toasted and chopped pecans or walnuts
- Powdered coconut milk to sprinkle over the cake
- METHOD:
- Preheat the oven to 340˚F, and generously butter a 9x5-inch loaf pan + 1 small one.
- Whisk (or sift) together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, spices, and salt in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, whisk together the sweeteners, olive oil, pumpkin purée, and eggs. Add the dry ingredients to the bowl with the wet ingredients and whisk until just combined. (Adding the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients helps to prevent little dry pockets in the bottom of the bowl.) Fold in the chopped chocolate or nuts.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 75 to 90 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Let the cake cool in its pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Run an icing spatula or a thin knife carefully around the edges, and invert the cake from the pan. Re-invert the cake so that it is right-side-up and let cool on the rack for another 20 minutes. Transfer to a serving plate.
- Notes: you can make your own squash purée: Remove the seeds from a 1-pound piece of kabocha squash and drizzle the squash with olive oil. Place squash cut-side down on a baking sheet and roast in a preheated 425˚F oven for 30-45 minutes, until the squash is very soft and beginning to caramelize around the edges. Remove from the oven and let cool. Scrape out the soft flesh into the bowl of a food processor, and pulse until smooth.
- Place the puréed squash on a large square of cheesecloth, and wrap into a tight bundle. Put the bundle into a colander, and place over a large bowl. Let drain at least 4 hours, or up to overnight. Twist the top of the bundle to squeeze out any additional liquid. Unwrap the drained squash, and measure out 1 cup of purée for the cake recipe. Cover and refrigerate any remaining purée for another use (may be stored for up to 5 days).
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