Mini but big and fluffy.
I guess this is a belated fall post, at least for the Canada region. Snow has hit us here already, so we are in Winter mode. While we had our short autumn though I browsed the web for pumpkin recipes, or rather, there were everywhere. Being from Germany, pumpkin is not at all a staple in my autumn baking. My family once in a while would have pumpkin sweet sour as a dessert but it never suited me much. Here, pumpkin comes in many forms, mainly as pumpkin pie but also as loaf, muffin, bread, cupcake and anything else you might imagine. I accumulated a good list of recipes, about 10 pages long. I am not sure if I will be able to make them all, but it is good to know you might have the right recipe at hand.
This pumpkin loaf recipe comes from Simply Recipes (click here for there page). I was looking for something simple for a meeting and this is easy and requires ingredients you usually would have anyway. Simply Recipes is a very good site if you need inspiration. Their Recipe Index is well organized and you can search by main ingredients, which is quite helpful. I would recommend this site because they have basic recipes and more elaborated ones as well, pumpkin cheese cake for example.
One thing that I find weird is that you call this a bread, when it is essentially a cake. Why is it called pumpkin bread and banana bread and/or loaf? Has it something to do with the shape? I think I need to write about my notion of bread, or rather, my native countries’ notion of bread.
Ingredients:
– 1 1/2 cups flour
– 1/2 tsp of salt
– 1 cup sugar
– 1 tsp baking soda
– 1 cup pumpkin purée
– 1/2 cup olive oil
– 2 eggs, beaten
– 1/4 cup water
– 1/2 tsp nutmeg
– 1/2 tsp cinnamon
– 1/2 tsp allspice
– 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, optional
There is no special secret in how to make this, basically, mix everything together. First you mix pumpkin with oil, eggs, water and spices. Then you combine that with your dry ingredients and you have your batter. One thing I never really understand: “…do not mix too thoroughly”. If anyone can explain that to me, please go ahead. I don’t understand that quite, but so far I had no issues.
Now you can use that to make big loaves of bread or you make mini ones, like I did. You can also make muffins with it, or cupcakes. Just make sure you adjust the time to the size of your pans. For regular loaf size bake at 180°C for 50-60 min. Remember, your stove could be different so you might want to check after 40 min.
One of my mini loaf batches didn’t rise, so I couldn’t use that. However, I didn’t throw it out, I put it in the freezer for later use.
Tip: If a batch doesn’t rise reuse it. For example you could make cake pops out of it. I made cake pops shaped as candy corn and everyone love it.
Baking in Saskatoon 