Frightfully Fluffy

🎃 Pumpkin Finger Buns - These buns are so light and golden, it’s almost scary 👻

Hi everyone and welcome to all of my new subscribers. It’s so exciting to see my foodie loving community growing every week. It’s a little like watching my growing projects in the garden and on the window sill grow, in particular my tomatoes I am growing from seed this year. It all starts off small and hopefully will grow to something satisfyingly delicious!

This week I thought we would lean into the spooky season, sure it is over a week away meaning I have another substack due before then but I thought I would publish this one now to give you all some time to get these ready. I love the whole Halloween baking vibe, the Autumnal notes, flavours and colours and the creativity you can have with it all.

This week’s featured recipe is my ghoulish Pumpkin Finger Buns, they are topped off with a gorgeous sticky glaze, a smooth cream cheese frosting and some crunchy candy pumpkin seeds for good measure.

Honestly… these are freaking delicious, I have never made them before so when I tried one I knew they would be good, but I had no idea how good! They are light and fluffy even though there is real pumpkin puree inside, they didn’t go heavy at all. Probably because I extracted all of the liquid I could from the pumpkin puree I made. I was then going to toss out the excess liquid but tried it and it had such a lovely pumpkin flavour, as well as great colour that I thought I would turn it into a glazing syrup for the buns. I am glad I did this as the syrup really makes the bun tasty and sticky as well as accentuating the pumpkin flavour throughout! Have a look below for the full recipe and the why’s and how’s of each component.

This week I will also talk about what’s happening over on Studio Kitchen and it’s getting pretty scary over there too, with Ghostly Pavlova’s and much more emerging.

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The Recipe

Pumpkin Finger Buns

A fiendishly sticky situation to get yourself into this Halloween!

I wanted to create a Halloween themed recipe that used fresh pumpkin to flavour and colour the recipe. These buns have no added artificial colouring and are packed full of flavour. Obviously the way to get pumpkin flavour into a recipe is to use real pumpkin but it can be tricky to incorporate the ingredient into bakes without affecting the outcome or texture and density. I set about to make pumpkin puree as usual but wanted to extract as much liquid as possible. I did this by hanging the puree in a sieve lined with muslin, there was so much liquid extracted from the puree it was quite eye opening (pictured below).

After all, this liquid would have really affected the overall texture of the dough, the puree left behind was vibrant and thick, perfect for adding into my bake. When I saw the resulting liquid from the puree I gave it a taste and the flavour was so delicious, also the colour was fab so I thought I would turn it into a syrup to glaze our buns when they come out of the oven. The syrup was a master stroke, when boiled with sugar it reduced to a thick and deep orange coloured syrup with a great pumpkin accent in flavour. Once cooled it was perfect to brush onto the buns (pictured below).

The buns were made by by adding the ingredients and mixing to a dough before enriching by adding the cold diced butter to the dough like for brioche. It is a high hydration dough so harder to handle so after the first prove I refrigerated the dough to harden the butter making it easier to handle and shape into buns. The resulting texture was light and fluffy, great flavour and lovely yellowy/orange colour (pictured below).

They were brushed as soon as they cam out of the oven and once cooled were covered with an easy but delish cream cheese frosting that had more of that pumpkin puree added. A fave of mine is to pair my bakes with something crispy to contrast so what better than to add candied pumpkin seeds as the textural element.

To serve I made this wicked little pumpkin shrine and celebrated with a mug of Pumpkin Spiced Chai!

Makes: 12 buns

Prep Time: 4 hours

Cook Time: 22 minutes

Pumpkin Puree

600 g pumpkin wedge

Pumpkin Bread Dough

375 g strong flour

7 g dried active yeast

60 g milk, full fat

35 g caster sugar

5 g salt

165 g eggs, (approx. 3 large eggs)

125 g unsalted butter, cold diced

150 g pumpkin puree (see above)

Pumpkin Glaze

300 g drained pumpkin puree water

300 g caster sugar

Candied Pumpkin Seeds

100 g water

125 g caster sugar

60 g pumpkin seeds

Egg Wash

20 g egg yolk, (approx. 1 large egg yolk)

50 g milk, full fat

Cream Cheese & Pumpkin Frosting

225 g icing sugar

60 g cream cheese

20 g unsalted butter

40 g pumpkin puree

10 g milk

½ orange, finely grated zest

¼ tsp salt