Sunday, November 1, 2009

Roasting pumpkins and pumpkin bread

Halloween week has been so busy! Aside from having to make some accessories for my Halloween costume (I was a Merlotte's Waitress a la True Blood), I had some baking to do. A coworker of mine has her birthday on Halloween (as well as my lovely non-local friend Kikiface , for whom I would totally make a cake if she comes down in December) I did my usual cake balls with orange candy and halloween themed sprinkles and wrappers. Sadly I did not photograph it though. I did make my awesome pumpkin bread though.

Now, I've made this a few times with canned pumpkin and I just don't like it as much that way. Occasionally I will find a hard crunchy bit in my bread and I can only blame the pumpkin for that, since it never happens when I roast my own pumpkins. So that's what I do, even though it turns my bread into a 2 day process. It's worth it, I think.

Roasting pumpkins is really easy. So the first thing you do is buy some sugar pumpkins, I think they also call them pie pumpkins. They're the smaller ones, like 6ish inches in diameter. All you do is slice them in half, remove the seeds, strings, and stem, (I usually dig a spoon under it and pop it off), cover in foil in a pan and bake for an hour or so at 375. Once that's done, let them cool, then scoop the flesh and mash it with a potato masher. Finally, put the mashy stuff into a colander lined in coffee filters or cheesecloth, let it drain in the fridge overnight. I usually put a clean plate with something heavy on top to help it drain more liquid. After all that is done, you have some fresh pumpkin puree that is way better than canned.

So I used my lovely pumpkin puree to make my favorite pumpkin bread recipe. I don't make it often enough, because of the obvious lack of pumpkins year round, but I am always super happy when I do.

Behold:


It's so spicy and yummy and cinnamony and good. If you can catch some pumpkins before they go out of style, you should definitely try it.

2 comments:

Vicki said...

YAY! I've been wanting to see your pumpkin bread and have the recipe of course. If I get a chance I'm going to make some today. Oh what's happening in December?

Jess said...

I have never had pumpkin bread. I just started making & liking pumpkin pie, so I think the bread would be right up my ally. And now part of me really wants to make my own pumpkin. This could be really bad, but I think I'm going to try it.

And Kiki, December is when you & Neil get kidnapped & come to see us all.