Pumpkins are great! I love pumpkins because they taste great and they are so versatile. You can use them for sweet and savoury dishes, roast, cook, bake and puree them. The choices are endless.
This time I made a pumpkin semifreddo with it and it came out great (if I do say so myself).
I had the honour of getting the whopping amount of one pumpkin on my pumpkin plant this year! Luckily I had another plant, but same story, just the one pumpkin. I don’t know what happened, but apparently my pumpkins just didn’t want to produce more than one per plant.
Nevertheless, I was glad to have them and I have made 2 delicious dishes with them. One savoury (roasted pumpkin and beetroot, which you can find here) and one sweet (the one you are reading now).
The roasted pumpkin and beetroot is more of a peasant dish and the semifreddo is a bit more fancy, but only if you plate it that way. You can also put the mixture into ice cream moulds and eat them as ice cream popsicles.
I had a friend coming over for dinner and I wanted to make it a bit more fancy, but still easy, so it would feel more like a “real” dessert. And not just rip it out of the freezer and start munching straight away… I did that later, with the leftovers, so no judging from me at all if you do that.
This recipe is vegetarian, but you can easily make it vegan by substituting rice syrup for the creamed honey.
I used coconut butter for this recipe (also called creamed coconut or santen). It is whole coconut, ground really fine then made into a really hard block that stays firm much longer than coconut oil does at high temperatures.
So I recommend using coconut butter for this recipe. But if you cannot find it, you may use coconut oil, just put in 100 ml instead of 75 ml.
So lets get in the kitchen and make this Pumpkin Semifreddo!
Pumpkin Semifreddo
Equipment
- Knife
- Cutting board
- Oven
- Measuring spoons
- Measuring cup
- Food processor (fitted with the S blade)
- Baking dish or icecream moulds
- baking paper
Ingredients
- 250 ML Pumpkin puree (1 small pumpkin)
- 75 ML Coconut butter/creamed coconut/santen (or 100 ML coconut oil. But coconut butter is best!)
- 2 Tspn Almond butter
- 45 ML Coconut sugar
- 2.5 TBspn Creamed honey (or rice syrup)
- 0.5 Tspn Vanilla extract
- 0.5-1 Tspn Pumpkin Spice (or cinnamon)
Instructions
- First make the pumpkin puree, by roasting the pumpkin until it is soft, at 200 degrees celsius for about 40 minutes. Then grind it in a food processor to a fine puree
- If the coconut butter is hard, put it in a hot water bath until it is very soft or melted
- Measure all the ingredients and grind them in the food processor until well mixed
- Line a small baking dish with baking paper, pour in the mixture and cover it with a lid or plastic wrap. Or pour the mixture into ice cream moulds and put in the freezer for at least 5 hours.You can also make this dish a day before you wish to use it.
- After at least five hours, you can get it out of the freezer and slice it into pieces of your desired size. 2 really big pieces, 4 normal ones or 12 bite-sized ones
- Eat as is, or plate with dollops of vanilla whipped (coconut) cream and slices of orangeEnjoy!
