Monthly Madcap Challenge: Pumpkin Edition

Our first Monthly Madcap Challenge was pumpkin! I spent all week making super colorful Halloween cookies, so I dialed it down a notch and went with pumpkin bread. A few months ago, a friend gave me a bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter. It's awesome. It's basically a chain letter, but with very moist breakfast bread. You get a bag of yeast starter, let it ferment for 10 days, make the bread, keep a bag of starter for yourself, give starter bags to your friends, and so it goes. It's possible to make bread every 10 days, but if you can't make it that often, you can even freeze the starter at anytime and just bake when it's convenient for you. The standard recipe is great, cinnamony, sugary goodness. But for me, the real fun is taking the original recipe and adapting it to whatever flavors I feel like tossing into bread. I figured it would be a great way to make use of our monthly challenge ingredient: pumpkin.

Pumpkin Bread (Amish-style)

2 c flour
1 c brown sugar
3/4 t salt
1½ t baking powder
½ t baking soda
1 c Amish bread starter
1 c sugar-free applesauce
¼ c skim milk
3 egg whites
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
15 oz. canned pumpkin puree
1 c chopped walnuts
1 4-oz package of Jell-o flan-flavored pudding mix - comes with a packet of pudding mix, and a packet of caramel sauce
1 t cinnamon
3/4 t nutmeg
½ t ground cloves
½ t pumpkin spice
¼ t ground ginger
extra cinnamon / sugar for sprinkling

Only use non-metal bowls and mixers for the bread. You can bake the bread in a metal pan, but no other metal should touch the batter during the mixing process.

Preheat oven to 325. Mix all ingredients in a bowl, except the caramel sauce packet.

Grease two large loaf pans. I use two casserole dishes, which results in more surface area per piece, and therefore more cinnamon / sugar to bread ratio. Dust pans with ½ c sugar and some cinnamon. Drizzle the caramel sauce in the pans.

Put batter in pans, sprinkle with more sugar and cinnamon.

Bake 1 hour. Cool 15 minutes. Remove loaves from pan and serve warm or cold.

Until next time - 

Madcap Baker J