An Acceptable Amount of Pumpkin Bread

There are many reasons for this post.  Firstly, a friend gave me some home cooked pumpkin puree, so I had fresh ingredients waiting in my fridge with a real expiration date.  Secondly, this week marks the beginning of the end of the Harry Potter Saga, and I promised my date for the movie that we would have appropriate snack food on hand.  Pumpkin felt witch and wizard food.  Thirdly, I am having a Friday night dessert at my house and needed to make something for it.  Currently I am the only confirmed guest, but I have some cute neighbors so if no one else shows up I'll just bring my bread over and use it to earn a place for me on their couch.  Lastly and most importantly, all pumpkin bread recipes make an obscene amount of bread.  Who needs three loaves of pumpkin bread?  OK, let me rephrase that.  Who has the metabolism that allows for the caloric intake that would inevitably follow the baking of three pumpkin breads?  Not me, that's for sure.

So with all that in mind I went on a hunt for a recipe, made some alterations, and got baking.

Now let me preface this by explaining that a lot of my best equipment is back at home in the kitchen where I learned to cook.  I am rather poor right now what with working for a non-profit and all, so I haven't invested in a flour sifter yet.  Also, being at the lower end of the income scale has quickly made it apparent how expensive unnecessary baking can be.  Organic eggs (the only kind I'm willing to buy, I'm a hippie at heart and I'm not afraid to admit it), pounds of sugar, butter, and chocolate are all expensive.  So I really haven't been baking nearly as much as I have in the past.  Which is just my way of excusing my stupid mistakes which we'll see in just a moment.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup canned or fresh pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/3 cup water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
handful of chopped pecans
1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Start by setting the oven to 350 degrees.  Now the basic easy directions are this: mix together wet ingredients plus sugar.  Add in sifted flour and baking soda, then pecans and chocolate chips, put it in a pan and bake it for about an hour and a half.

This seems simple enough.  But if you know me, and I'm pretty sure I don't have any followers who don't know me personally, you know I have a habit of making mistakes rather easily.  So I started by mixing the sugar and wet ingredients together.  They looked kind of soupy, but that's to be expected.

Then I added in all the rest of the ingredients at once.

This is where it gets complicated.  The reason recipes tell you to mix the dry ingredients together first, and then add in the nuts and chocolate chips, is perhaps because it's much harder to break up clumps of flour when there is a (comparatively) giant pecan bit in the way.  This wouldn't have been an issue at all had I sifted the flour first with a handy (and fun) sifter.  They're really only a few dollars and using it makes you feel professional not to mention it's just fun.  You just turn a crank on the side of a sifter that looks like this:

and it pushes the de-clumped flour right through.  It's awesome.  I did not buy one, did not use one, and ended up with some major clumping.  This means someone will bite into my bread, look at a white spot, and ask if I put white chocolate in the recipe.  Then they'll realize it's flour and leave the rest of the uneaten bread on their plate.  Another reason I hate pre-sifting the flour and baking soda is that it just gives me another bowl to rinse, which I hate.  So this might have failed.  But regardless, this is how it looked after I took it out of the oven:

It did make the whole apartment smell delicious though.  So there's always that positive side of things.
But back to the negative, if you really want to make the bread work right you should dust the chocolate chips in 1 Tb of flour before adding them to the batter or they'll just sink right to the bottom of the mixture and you'll have a layer of chocolate chips on the bottom of the pan.  This is what happened with my bread because I was lazy and threw it all in at once.  And the moral of the story is: don't bake when you're feeling lazy or it won't come out the way you'd like it to. On the bright side, the bread does taste pretty wonderful.

If I get enough people to come Friday night, I'll also make an apple/pecan cake or a chocolate pie, but I'm not counting on it so those recipes may have to wait.

Until then, sift out, eat up, and pumpkin over to a rather tasty bread.