When I was in first grade, my class had a Thanksgiving party in which I was responsible for bringing cranberry bread. My mom made it with a boxed mix and I suppose it went over well with the six year old crowd, because every year thereafter, I would make cranberry bread — or pumpkin cranberry bread — for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner.
At some point in my early twenties I graduated from baking cranberry bread from the boxed mix to baking cranberry bread from scratch. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the ingredients you use in your cooking will play a huge role in the quality of the final product. That means fresh citrus juices instead of bottled, high quality herbs and spices and Bob’s Red Mill organic unbleached white flour (grab your own with this coupon from the brand).
Organic Unbleached White Flour is freshly milled from Organic hard red wheat. Both the bran and the germ have been removed leaving the endosperm that is made into white flour. It is not enriched with any additives. This is the same high protein flour used by professional bakers and produces high, well-textured loaves of bread equally as well as it produces light, airy baked goods.
A lot of people consider pumpkin to be a fall thing: from late August until Thanksgiving the world seems oversaturated with pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavored products. For me though, the baking spices paired with pumpkin are warm and festive: perfect for cooking and baking all season long, well beyond Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Plus, there’s nothing more festive and holiday spirited than cranberries.
You can be pretty creative with your pumpkin bread … and your cranberry bread, so I thought, ‘why not simply combine the two? Adding fresh, tangy cranberries to a warm, earthy pumpkin bread laced with fall spices is the perfect baked treat to take you from the fall/Thanksgiving spirit to the festive holiday season. If you want to impart a nuttier flavor into your bread, swap half the flour for almond flour. Bob’s Red Mill Almond Meal is ground from whole, blanched sweet almonds, which adds a nice nutritional boost, too.
If you like glazes on your quick breads, orange is a nice touch, but I prefer to keep mine plain and simple.
This bread is great for gift giving too — buy disposable loaf pans and wrap each one in a festive tea towel and you have a great teacher or neighbor gift — if you can keep from digging in long enough. To be honest? I’m not so sure I could.
- 1¾ cups Bob's Red Mill Organic Unbleached White Flour
- 1 cup granulated white sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon allspice
- ¼ teaspoon cloves
- 1 cup fresh or canned pumpkin
- ½ cup canola or vegetable oil
- 2 eggs
- 1½ cups fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped
- Preheat oven to 350ºF. Spray a loaf pan with cooking spray and set aside.
- In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. In a separate mixing bowl, combine pumpkin, oil and eggs.
- Stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients until the mixture is blended. Stir in cranberries.
- Fold batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 60-75 minutes or until a toothpick/cake tester inserted into the center of the bread emerges clean.
- Remove from pan and cool before serving. Store in an airtight container for 3 days.
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
3 Comments
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Daryl
November 20, 2016 at 2:39 pmLooks so fresh and moist. It will be on my table this Thanksgiving!