It may come as a surprise to some of you, but baking is definitely not as easy as some of the amazing people out there make it look. You do get better as you practice though – look at me, now I can bake AND watch Family Guy at the same time. 
For me, the trick in getting better has been about mastering the basic techniques. This week’s technique is “folding.” I’ve seen it written in a thousand and three recipes, and I’ve sure read about what it means “to fold” in baking, but for the life of me it made no sense whatsoever. Cut where and when and flip what up from the bottom? Finally, I gave up and consulted YouTube. In a matter of minutes, the clouds of confusion parted and clarity shined in. Now, you too can be enlightened by watching the art of “folding” below, thanks to Dyann. Whew!
This weekend I was very much into breakfast baking, so late on Saturday night I cracked open my second partner in crime, the awesome Baked: New Frontiers in Baking from the Brooklyn baker extraordinaires, Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Their story is inspiring, and had me sitting on the couch dreaming of my very own little bakery someday. You can read more about them here. In either case, as I leafed through the colorful pages, I fell in love with the seemingly delicious recipe for a pumpkin chocolate chip loaf. It promised to be moist, sweet, and enough to feed us breakfast for several consecutive days. So, I hope you have your baking gear on, because here’s what you need to get started:
Raw Materials
3.25 cups of all-purpose flour
2 tsps of cinnamon
1/2 tsp of ground allspice
1/2 tsp of ground ginger
2 tsps of baking soda
2 tsps of salt
1.75 cups of pumpkin puree (15 oz can)
1 cup of vegetable oil
3 cups of sugar
4 large eggs
1 tsp of vanilla extract
2/3 cup of water at room temp
1.5 cups of chocolate chips (12 oz)
Bakeware & Tools
2 9in x 5 in loaf pans
2 mixing bowls and whisk (oh, the rustic instruments)
rubber spatula
What I did and what you should do given what I did:
I have to be honest, there’s not going to be much deviation in the case of this amazing recipe. It’s simple, to the point, and yielded the most delicious outcome! There’s enough here to make two loaves and though I shied away from making that much at once, all I have to say is that it was done late Saturday night (along with cupcakes!) and the last piece was finished off 48 hours later.
What to do: Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and lightly dust your pans with flour. In one large bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, allspice, ginger, baking soda, and salt and set aside. In another large bowl, pour in the pumpkin puree and oil and whisk together until combined and somewhat creamy.
Then add the sugar, gradually. I found it easier to combine the sugar with the mixture if I wasn’t dumping everything at once, since clumps begin to form pretty easily. Combine the eggs, one at a time, followed by the vanilla extract. Add the water in gradually and mix.
Stir in the chocolate chips using the spatula. I did not use as many as asked for – only about a cup worth of Hershey’s milk chocolate chips, but that was more than enough. I was told by several tasters that the loaf had “just the right amount of chocolate.” Who knows? Maybe it would still have been the “right” amount at 1.5 cups of chocolate too.
Now comes the fun part, where the instructions tell us to “fold” the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Thankfully, we took preemptive measures and are fully educated in the mysteries of folding (and you thought that story was going to have no point in this week’s recipe – humph!). I poured in only a part of the flour mixture into the puree bowl and followed Dyann’s technique. Matt and Renato suggest folding until the flour is just combined and warn about overmixing. I suspect that deflation can occur not only for whip cream-based concoctions. Once done, pour half of the bowl into one pan and half in the other. I shook my pans from side to side, backward and forward a little to spread out the mixture and even out the top. Here’s what my pumpkin bread to-be looked like before going in:
An hour and 15 minutes later, after baking in the center of the oven and rotating the pans halfway through baking time, as suggested by the authors (another good tip: insert a toothpick into the center and make sure it comes out clean!), it was a pumpkin-filled October night in January:
The result was – to say it plainly – incredible. Soft crust on the outside, luxuriously moist on the inside, the chocolate chips barely melted and the smell of pumpkin fragrant and delicate. We paired it with a glass of kefir, and ate till we licked our fingers, gliding them across the plates attracting wayward crumbs. Two loaves later, having been meticulously devoured by us, our families, and neighbors – and not even a morsel left to share with the local mouse, what else is there left to do but sit back and enjoy the contemplative sounds of digestion. Perhaps – but before we do that, would you care for a slice?
Bon Appetit!
