Pumpkin bread with pecans and cranberries

morning tea with pumpkin bread

I think you will love this pumpkin bread; it has a lovely light and moist texture, and a perfectly sweet flavor from the winter squash and hint of maple syrup. The cranberries add a nice burst of color and tangy flavor to the batter too. This bread is very different from the overly sweet cake-like breads I often come across and it could be served as special breakfast treat. Or, you could bake it to accompany morning tea, as I did for my mother the other day while she was busy knitting us cozy winter scarves.

Since this bread is made with sprouted spelt flour, my new favorite ingredient from Shiloh Farms, it bakes up lighter than regular whole spelt flour and digests easily. The spelt berries are sprouted first so they actually digest as a vegetable, which would explain why we felt so good afterwards.

mashed kabocha squash

If you steam the squash and get your ingredients ready the night before, the bread comes together quite quickly. If there’s any left over, it’s great toasted the following day.

This bread tastes delicious strait up but my mother highly recommends spreading it with butter, while it’s still warm!

with butter!

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vegan pumpkin scones with currants and pecans

freshly baked scone

Ever since the beginning of fall I have been craving a good scone, one that’s naturally sweet, light and buttery to accompany a good, hot cup of  tea. You can enjoy the scones here without jam and cream or butter.  They are what I call American style scones. American scones usually have fruit and/or nuts stirred into the batter and are best eaten plain, very different from the whole wheat version of my grandmother’s scones that I made last fall.

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carrot pistachio cupcakes with citrus frosting

carrot pistachio cupcake

Carrot Pistachio cupcakes with citrus frosting

There are many more of my favorite ingredients in these cupcakes that I wanted to fit into the title, but how long can a name for a cupcake be?

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sesame no-knead bread

sesame no-knead bread

There was suddenly a lot of talk about baking bread around here and during the last couple of snowstorms we finally brought our talk to fruition. I should mention our impulse to get a loaf in the works was spurred by my sister’s arrival back from Australia with a few precious gifts: a jar of my father’s famous chutney (made with his homegrown tomatoes), my mothers blackberry jam (blackberries picked from the borders of her biodynamic garden), and some much requested fresh organic macadamia nut butter. I felt that all these delicacies that had traveled so far deserved to be eaten on really good, freshly baked bread.

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Whole Wheat Scones

scones with bonnie's plum jam

This fall my sister got a serious “baking bug” and made everything from delicious ginger carrot layer cakes, biodynamic quark cheese cakes and pavlova, to whole wheat shortbread and a tiramisu (“pick me up” in Italian) that lived up to its name so much so that I was tipsy after I ate a piece and couldn’t sleep!

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Sprouted Spelt Bread with Seeds

sprouted spelt bread with seeds

“Sprouts represent the point of greatest vitality in the life cycle of a plant.”

Paul Pitchford, Healing with Whole Foods

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Spelt Blueberry Muffins

local blueberries

This one is for my father. If you saw his comment back in June he hasn’t had a decent muffin in very long time. I broke out the frozen organic blueberries (that I preserved in the freezer from the summer before) xmas morning and whipped up a batch for him.  Although it was years ago, I still clearly remember his enthusiastc response.

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