Autumn Baking-Week 1: Pumpkin Bread

 Last year, I felt robbed of our descent into autumn here in Seattle. Summer never ended till the middle of October, and we even had a 90 degree day that month! When autumn finally arrived, the leaves changed pretty much overnight and we went right into the less fun part of autumn, when the leaves fall off the trees. This year, it's more normal. The leaves are slowly changing, the weather is slowly cooling down. I can finally use the oven again!

Since I have to start my 12 Weeks of Christmas in October, this gives me a short window of time to truly enjoy autumn baking and all that it entails. This year I am focusing on pumpkin-based baked goods. Today's was this recipe for pumpkin bread. I thought it would be a good, easy way to get this started. It's a very basic recipe and I had all the ingredients except the pumpkin, which I got at the store this weekend.

Here is the visual breakdown of how it went.

The wet and dry ingredients in their separate bowls. This is a very basic recipe, but there's a lot of spices in it, so it doesn't taste plain at all.

Blended ingredients, but not mixed together yet.

And post blending of the wet and dry ingredients. It almost has the consistency of pumpkin pie filling.

My sister hates raisins, but I love them, so instead of one large loaf, I used smaller loaf pans and did half with raisins and half without. All of it had walnuts, though.

Here we have them out of the oven. When you use smaller pans like this, it only takes about 40 minutes to bake, instead of over an hour, so that's nice to use less time and energy this way.

Buttering the inside of each pan makes so easy to take them out, but keep the pans because once they're cooled off, you can put them back in to keep them from drying out as much.

The texture is really soft, and the flavors are strong. I really liked this with some butter on it. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that if properly packaged, these could be frozen and thawed at a later time if you can't eat all of this by yourself at one time.

Well, there you have it, a really easy and delicious way to get back into the swing of things for baking in the autumn. Buy a can of pumpkin the next time you go to the store and try this one out. You won't regret it!