The winning vote goes to pumpkin

Thanks for the vote to see some pumpkin recipes! With Fall and Thanksgiving coming up pumpkins are everywhere. I personally am not a huge fan of pumpkin pie, but I do like using pumpkin in other recipes. Did you know that you can substitute pumpkin for the oil or butter in a recipe? Yes it works just like apple sauce in that it keeps it moist and holds it together (well I think it helps hold it together). The other day I noticed I had a can of pumpkin that needed used so I went to the website on the can and found a recipe pumpkin carrot swirl bars. They sounded great and hey it even had carrots! Click on the recipe title to go to the original recipe. I for one did not have all the ingredients and two like to tweak recipes to make them healthier if I can. So here is what I did: I made it twice so I'll give you the info for both of them. My first attempt I did not have cream cheese so I omitted the topping,and just made the "bar" part. I also did not have enough carrots so I substituted some shredded apples. It was delicious. We were going to our friends house to watch a football game, and I got so many compliments! It was super moist, and oh by the way I also made it in a 9x13 cake pan instead of a jelly roll pan. Which made it more cake-like than bar-like. The second time around I changed a few more things. For the sugar I changed 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar to 1 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup shredded apple. Then I substituted half of the flour with whole wheat flour. The results we're great. It was still very moist. One thing I would change next time is instead of buying pre-grated carrots I would grate my own. The reason for this is that the pre-grated ones we're dryer and instead of the carrots melting into the cake, they we're more prevalent and chewy. Which is ok unless you are trying to hide the fact that there are extra veggies in there;)