Adventures in Pumpkin Bread

The cooler temperatures gave me a yen to make pumpkin bread. I don't recall whether I'd ever made it before. I didn't have a good recipe I could immediately turn to, and I honestly didn't want to find a recipe online -- you never know about those. Besides, I was honestly in the mood to peruse some of my more lovely recipe books. Which I did: Tasha Tudor's Recipe Book, Jan Karon's Mitford Cookbook (thank you, Carolyn!!!), and the trusty America's Test Kitchen cookbook.

I finally blended 2 recipes I found, and made a loaf. Julia helped. The ATK book noted that canned pumpkin will taste better if you warm it well on the stove with its spices. It gets rid of the canned/chemical taste. So we did.
(Meanwhile, Adam spent the morning wrestling with my laptop, whose hard drive was FULL. As in, things wouldn't run because there was not a smidgen of space left. There it is in its naked state. Poor thing. He couldn't find a solution, so I ended up deleting over 3700 photos I had on my IPhoto. Sigh.
Here's the loaf. I didn't cook it fully, so it was heavy. But it tasted great, and Julia gobbled up about half of it. Still, the recipe was less than satisfactory. It was really a banana bread recipe, and I don't think the substitution was, um, perfect.
That was yesterday. So, today, I tried again. And again, I thank my friend Carolyn for a GREAT pumpkin/cranberry bread recipe. She uses it for a large coffee cake in a bundt pan, but I opted for mini-loaves. Aren't they cute? (There's an extra little round loaf just for Julia.)
I adore these little loaf pans. I've picked them up at junk stores for 25¢ each. I think I'll give these loaves to friends, but I'm planning to bake pumpkin bread on a regular basis this fall. It makes the house smell just as it should.