I am despairing a little bit as when I sat down to plan all my recipes up until Xmas, I realised that 75% of them are sweets!! What can I say, I love tarts, cakes and cookies, and in an ideal world, I would devote this blog to them alone. This would not be a very wise move, however, as I don’t just love making them…
So in a bid to inject some balance into my life, I tend to make more savoury dishes and punctuate them with an occasional sweet post. As balance isn’t something that the festive period is famous for, this rule will be thrown out in the upcoming months as I desperately need to get rid of all the festive dessert ideas percolating in my head while they are still seasonally appropriate. You don’t mind, do you? 😉 . This vegan pumpkin bread is dedicated to one of my readers, Dominika, who emailed me the other day asking for a pumpkin bread recipe. As I happen to love pumpkin and Xmas spices, she was in luck. I was happy to oblige. I have had to make my own pumpkin puree as it isn’t something that the UK is big on and given how straight forward it is – I simply cubed and steamed my pumpkin and then blended it using a food processor – I was happy to do so. If you live in the US or any other country where pumpkin puree is an autumn staple, you’ll be able to make this bread in half the time. This pumpkin bread is deliciously decadent, studded with crunchy pecans, beautifully enhanced with a range of autumn-reminiscent spices and topped with an indulgent maple frosting. One of my test versions included dark chocolate chunks in the bread too, but I concluded that it’s possibly too much. However, if you aren’t keen on frosting, but want to give it something a little bit extra, be sure to include those instead.
300 ml / 1¼ cups pumpkin puree* 60 ml / ¼ cup mild tasting oil (if using coconut oil, melted) 80 ml / 1/3 cup almond milk (or other thin plant milk) 175 g / ¾ cup + 2 tbsp coconut sugar or demerara sugar** 2 tsp lemon / lime juice (or white wine vinegar)
DRY INGREDIENTS
225 g / 1¾ cups + 1 tbsp all purpose white flour, GF cake flour mix or buckwheat flour, sifted 1¼ tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 1½ tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ginger ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp allspice ¼ tsp cloves 5 green cardamom pods, seeds crushed 150 g / 5 oz pecans, chopped coarsely
Although I give approximate US cup measurements for ease, I encourage you to weigh your dry ingredients when baking. Baking is a science and using cups for dry ingredients is an inherently imprecise measuring method. An incorrect measuring of flour can ruin a perfectly good cake, for example.
