Heck yes. Give us all the pumpkin spiced lattes, pumpkin facials and even the pumpkin bread. Fall is not the time to skip your comfort foods — especially now. Baking is our lifeline to longer, lazier, colder days spent inside and needing some feel-good food to nurture our bellies just a little. But how to do that and maintain some semblance of a healthy diet?
One of our favorite fall comfort foods is this recipe from Cookie + Kate. It’s a healthy pumpkin bread recipe that loses the refined sugars and replaces them with honey or maple syrup. It’s so yum, that no one will ever guess it’s a healthy version. Check their website for options to make it vegan, dairy free or gluten free as well.
This recipe takes about 10 minutes of prep and about an hour in the oven.
Happy baking, babes!
Recipe yields 1 loaf.
- ⅓ cup melted coconut oil or extra-virgin olive oil*
- ½ cup honey or maple syrup
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup pumpkin purée
- ¼ cup milk of choice or water
- 1 ½ teaspoons pumpkin spice blend (or ½ teaspoon cinnamon, ½ teaspoon ground ginger, ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg, and ¼ teaspoon allspice or cloves)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda (NOT baking powder; they aren’t the same!)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 ¾ cups white wheat flour or regular whole wheat flour
- Totally optional: ½ cup mix-ins like chopped walnuts or pecans, chocolate chips, raisins, chopped dried fruit…
- Pinch of ground cinnamon, for sprinkling on top
INSTRUCTIONS
- Preheat oven to 325º and grease a 9×5-inch loaf pan.
- In a large bowl, beat the oil and honey together with a whisk. Add the eggs and whisk until blended. (If your coconut oil solidifies on contact with cold ingredients, simply let the bowl rest in a warm place for a few minutes, like on top of your stove, or warm it for about 10 seconds in the microwave.)
- Add the pumpkin purée, milk, pumpkin spice, baking soda, vanilla and salt, and whisk to blend. Lastly, switch to a big spoon and stir in the flour, just until combined. Some lumps are ok! If you’re adding any additional mix-ins, gently fold them in now.
- Pour the batter into your greased loaf pan and sprinkle lightly with cinnamon. If you’d like a pretty swirled effect, run the tip of a knife across the batter in a zig-zag pattern.
- Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean (typically, if I haven’t added any mix-ins, my bread is done at 55 minutes; if I have added mix-ins, it needs closer to 60 minutes). Let the bread cool in the loaf pan for 10 minutes, then carefully transfer the bread to a cooling rack to cool for 20 minutes before slicing.
