Anthro-whocares-ology club Pumpkin bars!

Yo, this is Robbie,

My friend John is apparently an active member of the Anthropology club at the U, and they're having a bake sale. He wanted to do something pumpkin, and I was all like,

"John! Make pumpkin pie!"

And he was all like, "Okay, but how do we sell individual portions of pie???"

And I thought for a moment, and I was all like "Pumpkin bars!"

So I consulted Bittman, found his recipe for pumpkin pie, on p. 937. I thought to myself, "Hmm... this is exactly what we need! Except maybe take out the half & half, that'd make it too moist to be sold in bar for."

Pumpkin chunk, a pumpkin stem,  and the bowl of pumpkin seeds.

Oh, and we were also making ginger ale.

It called for two eggs per can of pumpkin puree. Well, because I prefer to do things the hard way, we bought and roasted and pureed our own pumpkins. A can of pumpkin is about 2 cups, so we used three eggs per four cups of pumpkin, (because two cups of half & half were taken out). We cut and seeded the pumpkins, and roasted them skin on, at 375 for about one and a half hours. Once they cooled down, it was no problem to take the skin off, and mash them up. Well, except that it was a problem. The pumpkins were cooked unevenly. To solve that problem, we cooked the pumpkin puree with extra water, effectively boiling the roasted pumpkin.

We mixed in 3/4 cup of brown sugar per two cups pumpkin, along with Bittman's spice mixture, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, ginger, and a lot more cinnamon than he called for. Like two tablespoons cinnamon. Per two cups of pumpkin. Gosh I like my cinnamon.

Anyway, this was a bubblin' hot pot of tasty pumpkin stuff, but at this rate it would never turn into a cohesive pumpkin bar. So we tempered the eggs with the cooling pumpkin stuff, mixing it in, and pouring it over the crust we'd parbaked earlier. This went into a 350˚ oven for about an hour, and came out, cooled, was topped with cream cheese frosting. The bars were cut individually, and frozen, to be wrapped and labelled & sold for $1.50 for the anthropology club.

This was not the most appetizing picture, but there're the pumpkin bars, unfrosted.