HALF MOON BAY PUMPKIN BREAD

A dessert bread made from pumpkins

Every year in Half Moon Bay, California there is a Pumpkin Festival, at which prizes are given for the largest pumpkin in the world. Never mind that for the last two years the winner has been in Nova Scotia: the citizens of Half Moon Bay take pumpkins very seriously.

At Christmastime in Half Moon Bay, people give each other little tins of this bread as presents. I also take it backpacking, because it's pretty resistant to being squashed (and tastes fine even when it is).

Ingredients

(3 1-pound loaves)

570 g granulated sugar
350 g all-purpose flour
2.5 ml salt
10 ml baking soda
5 ml cinnamon
5 ml nutmeg
4 large eggs
250 ml vegetable oil
350 g cooked pumpkin
160 ml water
175 g chopped walnuts
cream cheese (optional; for serving)

Procedure

Preheat the oven to 175C
Butter your containers well.
Sift the dry ingredients together into a large bowl.
Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, and add the eggs, oil, pumpkin and water. Beat thoroughly. It's easier to get all the lumps out if you use an electric mixer.
Stir in the walnuts with a wooden spoon.
Pour the batter into the containers, filling each only half to two-thirds full.
Bake for 60-90 minutes, depending on the sizes of your containers. If you're using a very small container, start checking much sooner. The bread is done when a toothpick in the middle comes out clean.
Cool about ten minutes, then loosen the edges of the bread with a knife, and turn out of the pans to cool the rest of the way on a rack.

Notes

For baking containers, you can use a loaf pan, metal cans, or whatever. I usually use 1-pound coffee cans, and it takes three of them. If you want tiny loaves, you could probably use soup cans.

I think the nuts are important in this recipe. Unless you absolutely hate them, leave them in.

It's not necessary, but you can serve some good cream cheese with it to spread on the slices if you like.

Rating

Difficulty: easy to moderate.
Time: 15 minutes preparation, 90 minutes cooking.
Precision: measure the ingredients.

Contributor

 
Vicki O'Day 
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California, USA 
hplabs!oday

Recipe last modified: 18 Sep 86

Original header

Path: decwrl!recipes
From: oday@hplabs (Vicki O'Day)
Newsgroups: mod.recipes
Subject: RECIPE: Pumpkin bread
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Date: 12 Dec 86 07:55:41 GMT
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