Since the Little Anglophile started solids a month ago, I’ve been having a lot of fun trying out new things in the kitchen. Making food for a baby has some special challenges: no whole nuts, no honey, very little salt and sugar. I stumbled upon a recipe for banana bread made without sugar, which he’s taken to like an adorable bald duck to water, and I thought surely I could find other baby-friendly bread recipes like it. How about pumpkin bread? It’s fall! Surely there must be one out there!
Ha, no. Every pumpkin bread recipe I came across either had sugar (quite a lot, in most cases) or honey. So much for that.
But I was undaunted. Nay, said I. The Little Anglophile shall not go without some pumpkin bread, thus discovering the very elixir of autumn. I myself would go forth, armed only with a sack of plain flour and a can of Libby’s and I would make this work.
And, after some trial and error, I did!
For anyone looking for the typical pumpkin bread/recipe flavour, these might come as a bit of a shock. They’re a little sweet, but not much. I mostly relied on the spices to add flavour to them. Feel free to go nuts with those, a little more cinnamon or nutmeg never hurt anyone. I bake LA’s breads in a cake pop mold that I picked up on sale–it’s perfect for these little things, which are just the right size for his wee hands. Plus, they’re cute and cute breads get you bonus Martha Stewart/domestic goddess points at playgroups. They may also make the other mums hate you for being that mum who appears to live her life as if it were an eternal Pinterest board. These are the risks we take.
Bonus for busy parents: these freeze really well, and defrost quickly.
Baby-Friendly Pumpkin Breads
Yield: About 30 little breads or 1 loaf
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda/baking soda
3 tsp mixed spice/pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup plus 4 tsp pureed pumpkin or other squash
1 T treacle/molassas
4 tsp canola, rapeseed, vegetable, or other neutral-flavoured oil
3/4 cup orange juice reduced to 1/2 cup
1 egg
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C/350 degrees F and prepare your cake pops mold or a loaf tin
Combine the flour, baking powder, bicarb, and spices.
In a separate bowl, mix all the wet ingredients.
Fold wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.
Fill your mold or tin and bake 15 minutes for cake pop molds or 50-60 minutes for a loaf tin (until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean).
Cool before eating. I actually find that the flavour of these improves overnight.
