This lovely cake is a perfect winter warmer, you can have it just sliced on its own, or made into cup cakes, but I like it sliced, toasted and buttered (with vegan butter or sweet almond oil of course). If you are going to have it this way I would urge you to use a little toaster oven, not one of those toasters where you push down the slices and they spring back up, done, this cake is not robust enough for that and all you will end up with is burnt bits in your toaster, burnt bits on your fingers and lots of sweet smoke setting off your fire alarms.
Ingredients
50g prune, pitted
175g date, pitted
260g grated pumpkin
22g baking powder
170g sugar
70ml olive oil
150g tapioca starch (flour)
120g coconut flour
6 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Pop the prunes and dates in 300ml water, bring to the boil, add 10g baking powder, allow to cool for five minutes.
Good, now purée that with a stick blender, this will give us our mucilage that will help hold this gluten free loaf together.
Tip in the olive oil, sugar, grated pumpkin and eggs, give it all a good mix.
In a separate bowl, combine the remaining dry ingredients (actually, at this point, a modification if you are not gluten free but would still like to try this most excellent cake, you could instead add 250g of self raising flour and the spices, instead of the gluten free flours and additional baking powder), stir into the cake mix, give it a good bash about, coconut flour loves to clump.
Pour into two lined loaf tins, or 16 small rectangular muffin trays, or as many round muffin trays as needed, or even a round springform tin, and into the oven at 180 degrees C fan forced for 30 minutes, then drop the temperature to 160 degrees and give them another 20 minutes, this cake loves to tell lies and say it is ready when it is not, so skewer test, and when the skewer comes out clean, give it another ten minutes.
Turn out onto a rack and allow to become fully cold before slicing. If you are not planning to eat it all within a few days (and this is one rich cake so you would need some help), lay the slices into container and freeze them, then fish one or two out, into the toaster oven, instant winter warmer afternoon tea.
