Pumpkin Bread

With the grey skies and cooler temperatures of this week, I was tempted to make something more autumnal for this week's breakfasts and tea times. As there was a container of pumpkin defrosted in my refrigerator, I decided to try my hand at altering a recipe rather drastically. In my experience, these kind of breads are much too oily and much too sweet, so I was going for a "healthy" variation that also added in two flavors that I think are perfect for pumpkin: walnuts/nozes and maple.

As we just had a Canadian visitor, we have a jug of real maple syrup sitting in the cupboard, so I pulled a little from that secret stash. I also made good use of my birthday mortar and pestle to make up my own nut flour: a handful of oats, a shy 1/2 cup of broken nuts and about 1 tablespoon of flax seed. The oats help keep it more on the flour, less on the paste side. But if you are not as much of a ridiculous overachiever as I am, you could just add an equal amount of regular flour and toss in some ground nuts.

It's good, not too sweet, with a little bit of nuttiness and the perfect texture. Bet it would be phenomenal as toast...or French toast! I can't taste the maple as much as I'd like, but it's my own fault for hauling off and dumping spices in!

The original recipe is here, but I made a lot of changes!

Maple-Pumpkin Bread

Makes one loaf

Ingredients
• about 1 1/2 cups pureed pumpkin (I forgot to measure!)
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 1/4 cup water
• 3/4 cups brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup

• 1 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat
• 3/4 cup mix oat/nut/flaxseed flours
• 1 teaspoons baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoons salt
• 1/1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
• (or, do as I did and add 1 teaspoon speculoos, 1/4 nutmeg, 1/4 cinnamon)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a loaf pan.

2. Mix first set of ingredients until blended. In a separate bowl, stir together the dry ingredients in the second set. Add the dry mix to the wet ingredients but do not overstir; just until the flour is absorbed is fine.

3. Pour into the pan and bake: depending on your oven, 40-50 minutes. A knife or toothpick should come out clean.

P.S. I forgot to take a picture before slicing into this bread. It does get dark, don't get too frightened and think it is burning when it isn't...