(Mis)Adventure in Trial and Error: Pumpkin Bread

Last year I decided to bake pumpkin bread for all of my friends for Christmas even though I had never made pumpkin bread before. I baked for the better part of two days and let my roommate lick the bowl and while I never tasted a loaf, it seemed like a success.

As early as August, friends were asking if I was going to do the same thing this year. I gave a hopeful response and was fortunate enough to be able to make (and eat!) a trial batch as I provided the pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving. There were pale spots in my bread and my sister told me that my baking soda was out of date. I suspected that it was simply the fact that the pumpkin had not blended in fully since I knew I was having trouble with the mixing.

During the Christmas (finals) baking season, finding time was quite difficult to negotiate, but I managed to pull together a thorough and rather smooth crop. I had an often interesting time trying to make deliveries, and missed a couple of people which gave me a chance to have a appropriately meal-like snack for the long plane ride (on an airplane that naturally served very edible food). Ah, success.

Then...

I arrived at my Mom's and found that she was making pumpkin bread for the staff at her office. We agreed that it was a wonderful, simple gift idea for large masses of people and I watched as she gathered her supplies together including...a mixer. A MIXER? Who knew that you could use a mixer? All of my embarassment and woes and right-arm-muscle-soreness could have been prevented by a simple technique. A mixer. Anyway, the one inherant and unavoidable problem with pumpkin bread is the 50 mins that it takes to bake, so Mom could not finish all of her batches at a time. I offered to finish the last batch so that they would all be ready on the same day. I was pumped to start another round of baking armed with my new knowledge. Here's the result:

Terrible!

Worse than any of the others!

Mom said it tasted good though.