This was pumpkin bread.
It's pumpkin season now. I have been thinking about pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin rolls, etc... then I saw a picture of pumpkin bread on a recent Cook's Illustrated's news letter with a recipe of "Really Good Pumpkin Bread." I made a decision. I will make a pumpkin bread! It was an easy, a sort of one-bowl-recipe. In this case, instead of a bowl, all ingredients were mixed in a sauce pan. The recipe was for two loaves. I halved the recipe to make one loaf.
The recipe tried to solve common problems with pumpkin bread like lack of pumpkin flavor, too dense or too caky, too sweet, and/or obscure spice level. I liked the recipe's suggestions to improve those points except their suggesting sweetness. For me, the recipe called for too much both brown and white sugar. I halved the amount of brown sugar, skipped all white sugar, and added two table spoons of Splenda. On the other hand, I didn't change the recipe for the cinnamon sugar topping, which provided pleasant sweet bites and didn't make us miss any sweetness in the bread.
I also made another change on the recipe. I didn't have cream cheese and butter milk, so I replaced them with mixture of low-fat greek yogurt and low-fat milk. My pumpkin bread was nicely moist without adding extra fat. And nicely spiced. A lot of toasted walnuts inside was great too. The bread was good for breakfast as well as tea time. Why didn't I make two loaves as the original recipe was for?!
