Fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year. Many things about fall make me happy like opening the windows after months of air conditioning, wearing sweatshirts on the weekends, pumpkin spice lattes at Starbuck's, fall decorating, cooking hearty soups, a visit to the orchard for pumpkins and apples, leaves changing on the trees, Iowa football games, and baking with pumpkin. After tasting the pumpkin loaf at Starbuck's the other day, I was instantly inspired to make pumpkin bread at home. This bread was very good. You could taste and smell all of the spices and the pumpkin taste was not overwhelming. I think the bread tasted even better the next day. The full recipe makes three loaves of bread, so you could definitely cut the recipe in half or give a few loaves to people as gifts. Happy Fall!
Ingredients:
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2/3 cup water
3 cups white sugar
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ground cloves (I omitted this because it was 10 dollars at the grocery store)
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
Chopped walnuts for topping (optional)
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour three 7x3 inch loaf pans. You could also make muffins.
In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, eggs, oil, water and sugar until well blended. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended. Pour into the prepared pans. Top with chopped walnuts if you choose.
Bake for about 50 minutes. Loaves are done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
***adapted from www.allrecipes.com
I made this over the weekend...delicious! Trying to freeze some for later but it was hard to put away....
Posted by: Mary | November 24, 2009 at 09:00 PM