Here's one that uses butter instead of oil. It's Pumpkin Gingerbread but you can tone down the spices if your son won't like them. I would keep the cinnamon. I never used the dry mustard.. For kids I omitted the coffee and used water or orange juice instead. I made this all the time when my kids lived at home.The recipe has nuts but I used currants or raisins instead. You don't have to use either one, of course.

For a birthday cake I would bake it in layers. Maybe a cream cheese icing.

Maida Heatter's Pumpkin Gingerbread

If it's just canola oil you don't want to use, you could use one of the neutral tasting oils such as grapeseed or safflower. Pumpkin cake is one of our favorites in the fall. I don't use canola, but one of the above oils. Editing to add our favorite recipe.

Pumpkin Cake

4 eggs

2 cups sugar

1 cup salad oil

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 cups unseasoned pumpkin (I use one 15oz can of Libby's-not the pie mix)

Beat eggs, add sugar and salad oil. Sift dry ingredients together and add egg mixture. Add pumpkin. Blend well. Pour into greased and floured tube pan. Bake @350 degrees F. for about one hour. Remove from oven. Let stand 10 minutes, then remove from tube pan to cool. Frost with cream cheese icing.

1 pkg. (3 oz) cream cheese (softened)

1 stick softened butter or margarine

1 box (15 oz) powdered/confectioners sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream the cheese and butter together. Slowly add the powdered sugar. Then add vanilla. If icing seems too stiff, add a few drops of milk or water to thin.

My Notes: I always bake this in my bundt pan and quite often use a glaze instead of the icing. My grandson still prefers the whole cake be iced. I've never had this cake fail; very easy and if you do a thorough job of greasing the pan, it comes out easily. (I don't flour my pan) I also just mix this with my Danish dough whip, rather than a mixer.

Thank you both for your replies - my son really likes gingerbread and mustard, so he would be intrigued by the first one :) - I'd have to figure out how to convert the time/amount from a loaf pan to a 13x9 or bundt pan. The second one sounds good too. It's my understanding that olive oil and coconut oil are healthiest, so I've just been using those and butter. I bet I could use coconut oil/applesauce to replace the salad oil - thanks!

If your pumpkin cake contains cinnamon and ginger, as I would want it to...I'll bet your son would never know if it contained coconut oil.

When you cook and bake, the solids that provide particular health benefits from certain oils are mitigated. The fat itself is what the cake cares about. The pumpkin/chocolate marble cake from Sunset Magazine is excellent. It's a big cake, however, so if you don't want to fill a 16 cup Bundt pan, you could just make the pumpkin, or to do the whole cake, you could substitute the pumpkin directions for the cocoa half. This cake calls for butter, however. You can substitute for it, but whatever you use will change the texture.

1. LouAna coconut oil doesn't HAVE any coconut flavor - at least the one I've used as my primary cooking/baking fat for two decades (purchased at Wal-Mart).

2. You could also substitute melted butter and applesauce. Melting butter makes it a liquid fat that can be used as a vegetable oil substitute.

3. Check Wal-Mart for a bottle of Carrington Farms Coconut Cooking Oil (unflavored and odorless - also available from Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/Carrington-Farms-Coconut-Cooking-Ounce/dp/B00FW9Y1CW?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAIKBZ7IH7LXTW3ARA&&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00FW9Y1CW&tag=wwwbookcompar-20&ascsubtag=56099e0748308f0ebcdf3496.

I haven't had vegetable oil or shortening in my kitchen for over 30-years, and I wouldn't start when there are good coconut oil substitutes available.

-Grainlady

I just thought -- if this is for a children's party, you might do
better to skip the coconut altogether. Many children are allergic to
it. I've been worried for myself with so much coconut being used in baking. My coconut allergy hasn't been serious, but I did have a reaction just to palm oil shortening in pastry.

plllog, I more keep to olive oil, coconut oil and butter because they supposedly aren't "bad" for you like all the other ones - so in a cake, not so much for health "benefits" but I just don't buy the other stuff (like grainlady). It's not a kids party - he will be 20! and it is a standard crowd with no coconut allergies, but grainlady said melted butter is fine, so I may do that. I'm not always sure when they can be even replacements in baking. Thanks for that recipe - it looks delicious, although I wasn't sure about the combination of pumpkin & chocolate. My bundt pan probably isn't that big, I'll have to check. He does like bundt cakes, though.

Ah, well, knowing your audience is the key, isn't it? So much easier when you can just feed them and not have to worry.

Given what you've said, you could, of course, do the coconut (I'd trust Grainlady on the substitutions). If you'd rather use oil, you can use Lite olive oil, which doesn't have the solids. It's still pure olive oil, however, but doesn't have that olivey taste (though olive and pumpkin do go together).

The Sunset recipe gets raves. I use Valrhona cocoa powder, but then I'm really really careful with the marbling, or it all tastes chocolate. :) It should bake up just fine if you did double pumpkin. The pan size is the old, original one, but it should be an easy recipe to reduce. Lizbeth-gardener's recipe looks good too, and simple.

Happy birthday to your son -- and to you! (I think moms should get continuing applause on their children's birthdays!)

Ok thanks, if it would all fit in the pan I wouldn't want to reduce it - can't have too much cake :)!

I only have known one person who is allergic to coco nut...but it seems more and more children are allergic to peanuts

Elba, if your pan doesn't say how big it is, you can just use a big measuring cup to see how much water it will hold.

Linda, it's true about the peanuts. I've read that doctors speculate about the causes for the rise, but haven't seen an answer. Peanut allergies can be extreme, like people have trouble breathing just from smelling someone's peanut breath. When I was a kid I didn't know anyone with a peanut allergy, but quite a few who were allergic to coconut. Some only get a rash. Others, like me, have tingling or swelling in the mouth and throat (signs of the potential for anaphylaxis). Mine isn't bad--I can taste even a tiny bit of coconut flesh in something and spit it out before I've eaten enough to have an issue--but I worry that if I can't sense the coconutiness of something made with coconut fat, that I could eat enough to get in trouble, and I worry more about kids who don't know that they should ask about how the cake is made.

According to allergy sites, coconut allergy is rare even among people with tree nut allergies ( because coconut is not a nut) and there is almost no literature on coconut oil allergic reactions because the oil doesn't contain protein. I have known lots of children, and adults who say they are allergic to coconut, because they don't like the texture. To quote someone I know.."I chew and chew and it won't swallow".
If coconut oil were problematic, there would be lots of people for lots of years having problems because it and palm oil have been added to so many cookies and snacks over the years.

Well, Linda, I don't know what happens with other people, but for me it's not texture--it burns my tongue. I can tolerate small amounts of coconut but still spit it out if I taste it. Before I understood that there was coconut in just about everything at a Thai restaurant even if it's not mentioned in the description, I had a couple of instances of reactions from eating Thai with friends. I never did from the mama who cooked wonderful Thai food at a little hole in the wall, where I first learned to love it--she used the whole range of traditional Thai flavors, but only used coconut in a few things and labeled them. Of course, her food was more homestyle, and better, than one gets at most Thai restaurants, as well, so giving those up hasn't been a sacrifice.

As I said, it's not like the peanut thing where people go into anaphylaxis from the tiniest bits. Some in the allergy trade don't consider it a actual allergy if it doesn't kill you outright -- they call things that give you rashes, flu-like symptoms and/or intestinal distress "sensitivities". This is trade specific, and not the way English is used, so I'll continue to say "allergy". It does have nothing to do with tree nut allergies, you're right. Technically, peanuts don't class with tree nuts either, though they're more likely to go together when there are multiple allergies.

I didn't even think I was allergic to "palm oil" until I had a reaction -- fuzzy feeling in the mouth -- to pie crust that I myself made with the Spectrum cold pressed palm oil shortening. I didn't used to be worried about coconut oil until it started becoming so very popular in the last few years. Perhaps that fuzzy thing and burning tongue aren't precursors to a dangerous result. I know that when fish makes my face numb, it is, and I also know it's the decaying proteins in fish that are the trigger. But people shouldn't have to feel like they're eating poison ivy either.

Thanks all, I used lizbeth-gardener's recipe since it was already for a bundt pan (that's what he wanted) and she said it never failed lol. I did used half coconut oil (not LouAna), half applesauce to replace the salad oil, and some extra spices. It smelled somewhat like coconut when I took it out of the oven, so I was a little leary since he isn't the biggest fan of coconut. I had made it last week and frozen it. We had it today and it was very good and very moist, and didn't really taste like coconut. I would definitely make it again. I made cloudy _Christine's as a backup in case we didn't have enough, but I have frozen that one since we had plenty in the bundt. Thank you!