Fall is in the air, and for me that always means PUMPKIN! This homemade pumpkin bread recipe has a huge shortcut – a boxed cake mix. Simply blend cake mix, required oil/butter, eggs, pumpkin puree and spices. Simple. Fast. Delicious!
Last year’s pumpkin harvest was truly out-o-control! I harvested so many pumpkins! Sure, I shared several of them with family & friends. But I still ended up with mountains of my own.
I love to use these heirloom pumpkins for puree in my Pumpkin Granola so I cooked ’em up & pureed them. They were measured out into 2-cup measurements and frozen for future use.
But RancherMan was the wild-hog-hunting KING and our freezer was filled to capacity with pork. But I still had two remaining pumpkins…
They had some staying power, still looking as fresh as the day I harvested them. But I really needed to do something with them before they started to deteriorate. With no spare freezer room, what will I do?
When you dehydrate fresh pumpkin you can fit a whole pumpkin in a tiny ½-pint canning jar! And unlike storing pumpkin puree in the freezer, dehydrated pumpkin can set right on your pantry shelf in a sealed jar, it uses no additional energy to store.
There are several recipes I love that use pumpkin puree. So to provide that ingredient myself, I like to grow sugar pie pumpkins in my garden. But how do you make puree? Well I’m so glad you asked.
This year I planted heirloom sugar pumpkins in my garden. And when it was time to harvest them I knew I’d first be able to enjoy them for a bit as decoration. I love the way those little pumpkins looked propped on our antique cast-iron Franklin stove.
But several days later I was in the kitchen enjoying the last of my favorite pumpkin granola. I knew that since I planted those delicious pumpkins for use in my granola it was time to cook those babies down into pumpkin puree.