Pumpkin Bread

I decided to go through an old recipe box that I had. Since my trip to Minnesota and Wisconsin, I seem to want to bake a few things. I do not have a sweet tooth, but my mom does and so does my husband. I realized that when I baked the molasses cookies at my mom’s house, I have not baked anything sweet in a very long time. I couldn’t tell you when the last times was that I actually baked cookies. Maybe eight years or ten years.

Looks good....tastes good too!

So through the recipe box I went finding and remembering things I haven’t looked at in a long long time. Most of the things are written in my writing because I went through old family recipes and re-wrote them for my box. At the time I was really into the colored calligraphy pens.

I still have a few cans of pumpkin in the cupboard so when I saw the recipe for pumpkin bread, I thought it was just the thing to make.

The ingredients were simple and I had everything on hand

Pumpkin Bread

• 4 Eggs, beaten
• 3 cups Sugar
• 1 cup salad Oil
• 2 cups Pumpkin
• 2/3 cup water
• 2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp Cinnamon
• 1 tsp Nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground Ginger
• 3  1/2 cups Flour

Mix together beaten eggs, sugar, salad oil and pumpkin.

Sift together dry ingredients.

Add dry ingredients alternating with water.

Divide into 2 large greased loaf pans and 1 smaller greased loaf pan.

Bake 350F for 1 hour.

Pumpkin, eggs, sugar and oil mixture

Reading through recipe, I imagine “salad oil” is vegetable oil. I do not have any vegetable oil in the house. My choices were between olive oil and coconut oil. I decided to use the extra virgin coconutoil that I ordered from Tropical Traditions.

The sifter took to much time to use

As I was using my sifter I realized there has to be a quicker way so I switched to a wire mesh strainer and things went a lot faster.

This sifter worked better

I didn’t know how much to fill the loaf pans, so I did what I have done with other recipes – filled them half full. That filled two normal-sized loaf pans for me, no need for the addition small loaf pan. The bread did take longer to cook in my oven. I continued to cook the bread until a toothpick came out clean i the center.

Going in the oven

The pumpkin bread turned out wonderful. I let it cool for a few hours, but I still found it too soft to cut into slices. It cut a lot better after it was in the refrigerator and cold.

I will definitely make this bread again and add some chopped nuts to the mix. I can also see adding chopped dates or raisins to this bread too. I would even try baking it into muffins. I used canned pumpkin for this recipe, but I will try it using pumpkin that I cooked and froze last fall and I will add clove to this recipe and increase the amounts of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg to bump up the flavor more.

Sincerely, Emily