“This bread will take your tastebuds on a rollercoaster ride of flavor. There are no brakes.”

Yields: two loaves

Ingredients:

1 (15 oz.) can pumpkin puree

4 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

2/3 cup water

3 cups white sugar

3 ½ cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking soda

1 ½ tsp. salt

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. nutmeg

½ tsp. cloves

¼ tsp. ground ginger

To start, preheat your oven to 350° and grease two 9×5 loaf pans. No worries, neither loaf will survive. With an electric mixer or whisk taped to a cordless drill*, combine the pumpkin puree, eggs, oil, water, vanilla, and sugar in a large bowl until well blended. In another bowl, thoroughly whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda along with the combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ground ginger. Now, you must carefully mix the flour mixture into the pumpkin mixture. I do this slowly in one-cup increments, to avoid turning the kitchen into a pleasantly fragrant snowstorm. Once the contents of the two bowls have been married in loafy matrimony, evenly distribute the batter into the prepared loaf pans and bake at 350° for about an hour until a toothpick/icepick/guitar pick comes out clean. Let the loaves relax in their pans for ten minutes to keep them from falling apart on the trip from pan to plate, and enjoy with some cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top, along with some of your favorite unnecessary pumpkin-flavored foodstuffs. What you receive in return for your effort is a delicious pumpkin loaf with more spice in it than the Spice Girls. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Nothing can out-spice the Spice Girls.