Pumpkin Bread
 

it's a birthday in the office tomorrow and one of the guys requested my not so world famous but oh so tasty pumpkin bread with no candles on it...


Pumpkin bread
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups pumpkin (don't use jackolantern pumpkin, that's not as good as a sugar pumpkin or baking pumpkin-- or be lazy like me and used canned pumpkin)
2 eggs at room temperature
2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
dash of salt
1 cup milk
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup dried cranberries or raisins

Topping
mix together:
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Cream together butter, sugar and pumpkin until smooth. Add eggs and blend well. Mix dry ingredients together. Add dry flour mixture alternately with milk to the egg mixture. Add gently the nuts and cranberries. It is important not to overmix.

Prepare the loaf pans with either butter and flour (or use that baking pam stuff- with the flour already in it - it's great)

Put mix into loaf pans (this usually makes 2 -3 loaf smallish loaves) and sprinkle top with sugar/cinnamon mixture.

bake until knife or toothpick or piece of spaghetti comes out clean - Depending on the oven and the weather - it could be 25 minutes it could be 45 minutes or longer...

This also makes a mighty fine muffin..

Canned pumpkin is just as good, if not better than those sugar or pie pumkins... less work!

Thanks Mal.

I'm going to have to try this receipe out.

There's some cooking show that I watch, with Chris Kimball editor of Cookis Illustrated (I think) magazine.. It's a cool show because they are kind of like the consumer reports of cooking. They did a show last year on Pumpkin Pie and stuff and thru taste testings, they determined thatthe canned pumpkin has more pumpkin flavor than than fresh pumpkin and as long as you don't use pumpkin pie filling - canned pumpkin is 100 percent pumpkin

Wow... I don't think I've ever seen pumpkin pie filling before... I can only imagine it would be gross.

The canned pumpkin is very tasty. My theory is that the sugars have time to condense in the can... but what do I know.

Pumpkin pie filling has spices in it already and i think the evaporated milk that you would add to pumpkin to make punkin pies... It's pretty icky.

Yes, filling is icky. This recipe sounds like a winner mal...I'm definitely going to have to try it out....

Does it really matter if the eggs are at room temp? after all the whole mess is going in the oven, right?

Actually it does. The eggs, if not room temp, will cool the mixture and through off the baking times...

This is also true of lesser quality ovens. When you open the door to put the cake in, you can lose a lot of heat. I have a pizza stone that I leave in the oven to compensate for this...

and what i was told.. and I don't know if it's true or not, but eggs at room temperature mix better than eggs from the fridge, you don't want to beat this batter into the ground, makes it tough, as little mixing you can do - -the better.

(BTW - the bread was a huge hit!!)

Neat. I'll have to try this. I have two as-yet-uncooked sugar pumpkins and a virtually limitless supply of same if I want more. And I have some pumpkin in the fridge which needs some kind of use...

I'm rather ignorant when it comes to baking:

When you say "loaf pan", you're talking about a standard sized bread loaf pan. Correct? So, split the mix across 2-3 standard loaf pans?

What would happen if I put all of the mix, or 2/3 of it in one pan? Are larger loaves less tasty?

Thank you for the recipe. I have wanted to make pumpkin bread or banana bread for some time- it's pricey if you buy a loaf from a decent bakery.

-sapiens

The loaf pans I have are smallish - so it's hard for me to judge what a standard size loaf pan is...

You basically want to put the batter into the pan so that it fills up about 2/3 way or so.. (don't fill up too high -it doesn't rise alot, but it cooks faster when it's a smaller loaf.

cntrl-a + cntrl-c + cntrl-v pasted into a word doc! Save as "maleficent's magnificent pumpkin bread.doc"

:D