Abstract:

Can someone tell me why what is obviously a pumpkin snack cake, gets the label of "Pumpkin Bars" in every cookbook I've ever laid eyes on? Etymological semantics aside, I wanted to bake me some pumpkin bars, but wanted to make darn sure what was going into the oven didn't come out too much like a cake. After finding the best traditional pumpkin bar recipe in my pile of community cookbooks, I proceeded to ruin it by swapping out for ingredients like olive oil, brown sugar, and whole wheat flower that would be certain to mitigate any notions this baked good may have had of true cakeitude. The substitutions don't come at a cost of simplicity either; this easy to bake recipe still results in a crazy-moist, cake-like bar that hints of complexity in an otherwise standard flavor set. And because it just wouldn't be fair to not fiddle with the frosting as well, we went ahead and spiked our cream cheese frosting with Bourboun punctuated by flecks of real Madagascar vanilla bean.

Purpose:

Be sure not to miss my video recipe for this post (so you can snicker at me while I screw things up and try to frost these pumpkin bars while they're still hot).



Though not by choice, the only winter squash coming out of this guy's garden this year is pumpkin. After roasting and freezing the first two pie pumkins from the remains of my garden, I began looking for recipes. It'd been a long while since I'd had any pumpkin bars. Pumpkin bars... bars? Seriously, why do we call 'em "bars"? If you follow the majority of recipes for this treat to the letter, you'll find that in most cases that what we've really got here is a quickbread or even a full-fledged cake.



And while I like a good snack cake, what really comes to mind when someone says "bars" is something that's a bit more dense, and possibly even chewy. So, what kind of options does that leave? First, I could go another direction and put the pumpkin into a custard base. This would no doubt be great, but I don't want pie or cheesecake (not yet anyway). I've tried butchering a brownie recipe before by subbing out chocolate for pumpkin, which was met with mixed results; as it's so hard to get a pumpkin brownie to cook completel without a raw-tasting middle and completely overdone edges. No, I was gonna play it safe, and do something that cooked up even, so I'm back to cake.



So, if I'm sticking with the sure thing and doing what essentially amounts to a sheet cake, the least I can do is make it a bit more dense and bar-like. In one of my many community cookbooks, I spied a pumpkin bar recipe that was prime for the butchering (hey, it is almost Halloween). I tinkered with some substitutions that would ensure that any rise in this recipe would be kept to a minimum, and then added some flavors that I thought were missing from the recipe as wrote. And frosting. With booze.