Hey guys, Christine here!  It's Sweet-Tooth Friday and as promised, today's post is a continuation of last week's preparation of fresh pumpkin puree!  Get ready to fill your home with the smells of the season because we're baking everyone's favorite fall treat: Vegan Pumpkin Spice Bread.

And guess who has a home filled with the warm aroma of pumpkin spice right now…the No-Meat Athlete himself! That's right, I'm baking at my brother's house!

I was coming up for a small dinner to welcome our mom back stateside, but due to the electricity shorting out in my kitchen (adios, everything in the fridge) I showed up a couple hours early to work on my STF dessert.

This is actually round two of this week's post: before my electric went on the fritz, I was working on an entirely different pumpkin dessert.  I had picked up some stevia and I was excited to use it instead of sugar.  I guess I should have done some more research on stevia because it was a disaster!  A sickeningly sweet yet bitter disaster!  I only did a tablespoon but this stuff is really potent!  After getting fed up with the intricate stevia experiment that wasted a batch of my homemade puree,  I was in the mood for something comforting and simple like this yummy bread.

The recipe this week is based on one from The Joy of Vegan Baking.  When I originally got interested in animal-free baking, this is the first book I picked up.  But to be honest, I rarely lift it off the shelf anymore. Why?  It's not that the recipes don't taste good; for me the deterrent is soy.

Many of the recipes in this book rely on soy — soy margarine, soy milk, and silken tofu.  The book also leans heavily upon Ener-G egg replacer.  As I've progressed as a vegan baker, I've became less interested in creating soy copies of "normal" desserts.  My focus now is on making delicious desserts through the combination of REAL ingredients- and by 'real' I mean food I would be comfortable eating in or out of a baked good.

That being said, this is the kind of book that can win over the vegan naysayers, and it was a great introduction for me to see what could be done without the use of eggs and dairy.  And there are still some true gems here, like this gorgeous pumpkin bread.

I hardly made any changes to this recipe — it was already filled with the goodness of flaxseeds and applesauce.  Of course, I subbed in my fresh pumpkin puree instead of the 14oz can specified.  Oh by the way, I said in my last post that I got 2 cups of puree from each 'sugar pie' pumpkin — I have no idea why but after freezing and pureeing smooth it was reduced by about a quarter to half a cup.

To make the recipe a little more NMA friendly, I used a combination of whole wheat flour and whole wheat pastry flour instead of the all-purpose.  I also cut down on the sugar by half a cup and switched to turbinado instead of refined.  Finally, I threw in some ground ginger instead of cloves- that's just a personal preference because I always find cloves to be overpowering.  If you have it on hand, a tablespoon of pumpkin pie spice will do just fine in place of all the spices.

Pumpkin Spice Bread Recipe

3 tbs ground flaxseed

1/2 cup water

1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar

1/2 cup applesauce

1/2 cup canola oil

2 cups fresh pumpkin puree

3 cups whole wheat flour

1 tsp each cinnamon, fresh nutmeg, and ground ginger

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

1 cup chopped walnuts

sprinkles of oats and sugar for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Mix together the flaxseed and water until thickened.
Combine flax mixture in a large bowl with sugar, applesauce, oil, and pumpkin.
In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, spices, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
Stir the dry ingredients into the wet.  Fold in the walnuts.  Lightly grease loaf pans.  Divide into two regular 8 inch loaf pans or four mini loaf pans.  If you'd like, sprinkle on some oats or turbinado to garnish.  Bake the large loaves for about 55 minutes and the smaller loaves for about 40 minutes.  Let sit for 20 minutes before removing from pan.

Go ahead and enjoy these warm from the oven, or wrap up the whole loaf and make somebody very happy with a gift of pumpkin cheer!  This vegan pumpkin spice bread got a resounding "MMMMMMM!" from Matt, Erin, my mom, and me!  Plus, the loaves were so easy to make- just stir together!  I hope you enjoy this yummy and healthy slice of autumn.  Maybe I'll get that stevia figured out for next Sweet-Tooth Friday!

Until then, stay sweet!
xoxo Christine