Pumpkin Walnut Loaf
Posted by whatsonmyplate on November 17, 2007
And the pumpkin continues…
Last month I bought some pie pumpkins to make pumpkin butter. I underestimated the yield of pumpkins and ended up with A LOT of leftover puree. Rather than see it go to waste I decided to freeze it to use for various uses later. Sure the stuff in the can is OK but it has chemicals and stuff. I kind of want pumpkin. Period.
I absolutely love having something sweet after dinner and decided to whip up a quick loaf of pumpkin bread. I love quick bread s because they’re quick (duh) and because they tend to use fruits and/or vegetables (banana, pumpkin, zucchini) so you can pretend that they’re healthy.
But of course, they’re not.
A lot of quick bread recipes call for ridonkulous (yes, ridonkulous as in beyond ridiculous) amounts of oil and sugar. The sugar doesn’t kill me as much as the copious amounts of oil. Thus began my quest for a decent and healthier pumpkin bread recipe.
I found a number of delicious sounding recipes on epicurious but a lot of them called for 1 cup of oil per loaf! So I headed over to the Cooking Light site and found a number of recipes that suited my desires.
I ended up settling on this recipe from Cooking Light. What drew me to the recipe were a number of interesting twists. Along with flour the recipe calls for cornmeal. Cornmeal! Brilliant. I love the nuttiness of cornmeal. It also used a good mixture of spices including cardamom, mace and ginger. Cardamom! Great idea. I didn’t have mace so I used cinnamon.
I also liked that the recipe used whole eggs and not 8 egg whites or egg substitute or some cop out like that. I hate using a bunch of egg whites because it makes me sad to waste the yolks.
The only changes I made in the recipe were substituting cinnamon for mace, using about 1/2 cup less sugar and NOT using raisins. I hate hate hate raisins. OH! And I also made a streusel topping. I combined some butter, sugar, cinnamon and walnuts and put it on the bread before baking.
And for the record the cornmeal was a great addition. It gave the bread a nice texture… just a hint of crumbliness and some nutiness too.
This may very well be my new pumpkin bread recipe for life.
