Butternut squash day

Butternut squash is a strange vegetable. How many people cook with it regularly? Yet it seems that when introducing foods to a baby, butternut squash is a champion. I know I gave it to my girls as toddlers, but in moderation and roasted, not pureed. We don't eat pureed butternut squash, so why should they?

Anyway, I digress. For some reason, one jumped into my shopping basket this week and has been glaring at me from the fruit bowl, daring me to think up a use for it. I was feeling a bit loathed to just make boring soup, so I decided to try making a cake with it (more likely to be eaten too!). I guessed it would lend itself to mixed spices (the Americans call it pumpkin pie spice, which is a much nicer name, I think) and orange and so I adapted a recipe to come up with something.

Here is the cake, fresh from the oven, to prove that I did in fact make it. It smelled great while it was cooking, but the mix smelled of sweaty horses and I had a few reservations about continuing with the experiment.

It was very thin, so I sliced it in half and placed one semicircle on top of the other to make a sandwich cake.

Here is a slice of the cake, complete with icing and filling. The cake was too dense and the icing too runny. While warm, it would have been fine with custard as a pudding, but as a cake it was a fail.

It also had a slight aftertaste of sweaty horse, so I was right to be worried earlier!

In conclusion, I would probably stick to carrots in future vegetable-based baking, they are tried and tested and don't taste of sweaty horses.