Holiday Baking - Quick Breads

It's smelling really good in my house right now.

Tonight is the second meeting of our local bookclub and I'm baking pumpkin bread to bring as my goodie.  I also plan to wrap and give a loaf to each member to take home as a little holiday gift. (Photos at the end of this post.)

As promised, here are the recipes I use to make the BEST mini coffee cake and pumpkin loaves. First up, my famous pumpkin loaves.

As you can see by this photograph my recipe, taken from The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, circa 1970s, is extremely well worn and loved. The basic recipe makes two regular sized loaves of bread. Over the years I have experimented with different pans and have found that the entire batch fits nicely in one of the Pampered Chef fluted stoneware bundts but it looks like they are no longer available except through Ebay.  Currently, however, my favorite method of baking the loaves is in mini loaf pans.  As you can see in the photo above, I have two pans which each contain four loaf segments.  I tend to double the recipe, yielding 12-13 mini loaves total.

The coffee cake recipe was given to me by Catherine.  I've never prepared it in a cake pan, always opting to use the same mini loaf tins and baking temp/time as above.  These are really, really good as well.

Both breads, when wrapped tightly and frozen, are good for several months and will taste as fresh as the day you bake them.  (Good luck keeping them that long, however.)  


While writing up this post my first batch has cooled sufficiently so that I am able to share finalized little gifties with you.

The cute bags (or something similar) can be purchased in the baking departments of any Michaels, Joanns or Hobby Lobby.  I created the tags using this stamp set from Taylored Expressions.  (It's going to get a lot of use.) The tag dies are Decorative Tag 1 from Pretty Pink Posh.  (I love that they aren't your tradional looking tag.)  The cardstock and ink are Pure Poppy and Tropical Teal from PaperTreyInk, two of my favorite "go to" colors.  

Today's batch yielded 13 loaves.  I will be taking these seven as gifts and three to share during our meeting tonight, which leaves poor Meg (who was so excited to see me baking this morning) only three loaves.  She is going to be so disappointed but I promise, there will be more next week.  

Aren't they purdy?  Admit it.  Martha ain't got nuttin' on me.    :-)