Pumpkin Bread, Take 2

For those of you who were wondering, I did try the pumpkin bread recipe again for Thanksgiving. I really did want to try the recipe with the correct amount of canned pumpkin.

This bread came out much better. I served it with the choice of very gingery cream cheese or very buttery cream cheese. Not much of it disappeared on Thanksgiving Day, but I heard that it was a very popular breakfast item the next day.

I still thought the bread came out too cakey. I thought it was a little dense to be properly called pumpkin bread, and I didn't mix all the lumps out because I was worried about overmixing. I don't care for flour lumps in anything (my fault, entirely, though). It was good, but not my favorite. In its defense, though, I did sneak some fresh ginger into the batter, and it's possible those were the lumps.

Fortunately for me, my Mama did find her pumpkin bread recipe and she emailed it to me several days ago. I'm not sure when I'll attempt it because I think everyone else is done with it. I keep thinking about the Amish restaurant in Sarasota, FL that we tried when we were at the beach in October. They served Mama pumpkin bread and zucchini bread with her salad, and they just seemed the perfect thing to serve with a country meal. Maybe I'll do a semi-traditional New Year's dinner and attempt pumpkin bread again?

Here are a couple of recipes you might want to try if the Maine recipe I shared before isn't your thing:

• Alton Brown's Good Eats recipe - calls for real pumpkin, not the canned stuff
• adaptable recipe - includes adaptations to make it sugar-free or vegan