By Published Oct. 19, 2016.
Our recent cookbook, Naturally Sweet, is your ultimate guide to baking with less sugar. Perfect for bakers of all kinds, the book opens with essential information, including a substitution chart and a breakdown of the science of sugar. And best of all, the 120 revolutionary recipes for great-tasting baked goods and desserts rely on less processed sweeteners (Sucanat, coconut sugar, date sugar, maple syrup, and honey) and taste as good as the originals.
If the best thing about fall isn't cooking with winter squash, we don't know what is. Melissa from Bless This Mess couldn’t agree more. She recently baked up a loaf of our Naturally Sweet Pumpkin Bread recipe (and had a whole pumpkin week on her blog!), which is great served as a breakfast bread or snack for the kids.
Because it’s not over-the-top sweet, you really can taste the different elements like spices, pumpkin, and walnuts, so be sure to add them.
To dial down the sugar and achieve rich pumpkin flavor in our naturally sweet version of this fall favorite, we cook down a can of pumpkin puree. We found two benefits to this method. First, it gave the puree a rich, caramelized flavor and helped to eliminate its raw, metallic taste. Second, reducing the puree concentrated the sugars and made the pumpkin taste sweeter, helping to compensate for the reduced amount of sugar in our final recipe. Plus, as Melissa points out, “The best part is you just make the rest of the sweet bread batter in the pan you cooked the pumpkin in, so there is no mixing bowl to wash.”
What else did Melissa have to say about our pumpkin bread recipe and Naturally Sweet?
“This recipe has an amazing texture, the color is bright, the spices are just right, and it tastes great. It’s not your traditional sweet-as-cake pumpkin bread, but it’s still delicious. I wouldn’t think twice about giving this to my kids in the morning for breakfast.”
“Because it’s not over-the-top sweet, you really can taste the different elements like spices, pumpkin, and walnuts, so be sure to add them.”
“There’s so much learning and science in this book that it would be worth getting it just to be more informed on natural sweeteners. I loved reading it.”
