If you ever feel like having cheesecake, but you don’t have enough cream cheese in stock, or you just have a package of mascarpone about to hit the expiration date, this recipe will suit your needs. It combines the best of cakes and cheesecakes, and looks great when cutting through the marbled layers. I got the recipe from Peabody’s blog Culinary Concoctions (thank you), and made some alterations plus converted the ingredients to SI measures. I experimented a bit, and concluded that if you don’t have a pumpkin or can of pumpkin puree lying around, a great alternative is to grate a large carrot and mash a ripe banana. The taste, color and mushy texture of the resulting cake are fairly similar.

For the cake

– 240 g unsweetened pumpkin puree (or 1 cup) OR 1 large carrot + 1 banana
– 120 ml vegetable oil (or 0.5 cup)
– 2 eggs
– 300 g sugar (or 1.5 cup)
– 256 g plain flour (or 2 cups)
– 1 tsp baking powder
– 0.5 tsp salt
– 1 tsp cinnamon – 0.5 tsp ginger – 0.5 tsp nutmeg (or 2 tsp ready-made pumpkin pie spice, or Dutch speculaas spices)
– 120 g of your favorite nuts (or 1 cup)

For the cheesecake swirl

– 252 g mascarpone (or 9 oz)
– 75 g muscovado sugar (or 0.4 cup)
– 6 tbsp maple syrup
– 1 tbsp flour
– 1 egg

Method:

For the cake batter, mix together the pumpkin puree, oil and eggs, and in a separate bowl the flour, baking powder and sugar. Then gently mix these two together and fold in the nuts. For the cheesecake swirl, mix together the mascarpone, sugar, syrup, flour and egg. Now poor about 2/3 of the cake batter in a butter or oil-greased pan, poor on the cheesecake mixture, and finish with the remaining cake batter. You could go through the concoction with a skewer to create a more marbled cake. Bat it at 160 degrees Celcius (or 325 Fahrenheit) for about 60 minutes. To bake the cake in my pictures, I used a round cake pan, just because I wasn’t in a loaf-pan-kind of mood, but you could of course pick whichever way you fancy.