How to Make Easy, Healthy(ish) Maple Pumpkin Bread
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It’s that time of year when I want to do a lot of comfort baking, but I also am not ready for full-fat, full-sugar treats. So, I fall back on this healthy(ish) maple pumpkin bread. It’s made without butter or oil and is sweetened naturally with real maple syrup.
This recipe is great when you need a little something sweet but not too sweet. The bread is soft, dense, and moist topped with crunchy, salty, roasted pepitas for a little texture on top. It leans just a little bit into pumpkin pie texture, which I honestly loved. Just look: isn’t this the prettiest loaf?
Naturally Sweet with Maple Syrup
Maple syrup is a great natural sweetener because it has such a nice mild flavor. While you may not be smacked in the face with “pancake” flavor, you might notice earthy, woody notes in your maple pumpkin bread. You can always heighten the flavor with a bit of maple extract, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
Maple syrup is a great alternative to brown sugar because it has a lower glycemic index score and comes with actual nutrients like manganese and iron. Make sure you’re getting real maple syrup, though. The kind that comes in a bottle shaped like your grandma is mostly corn syrup and artificial flavoring.
Pumpkin is a Great Oil Substitute
So, we’ve sweetened with maple syrup, but now we’re going to replace the butter and oil with pumpkin purée. Funny enough, that’s the star of the show! Really, then, we’re just going to add a little extra pumpkin for moisture and skip along on our merry way past the added fats.
In most of your baked goods, you can use pumpkin as an alternative to oil or butter. In addition to lowering the fat content of your bake, it also adds fiber and vitamin A. It has a mild enough flavor that you could sub it in when you make cakes or brownies. It might just give you little surprise yellow color.
For this maple pumpkin bread, though, it’s front and center. We’re using a whole can so you can really taste the sweet, nutty, earthy flavor of pumpkin. Who would want a pumpkin bread that doesn’t taste like pumpkin? Silly.
Muffin Method for Quick Bread
We’ve talked about the muffin method before, but let’s reiterate real quick and then talk about how that applies to a quick bread like this.
The muffin method is the way you combine your ingredients for muffins. It involves separately combining the dry and wet ingredients and then folding the dry into the wet in as few strokes as possible to avoid excess gluten formation. Too much gluten leads to large “wormy” holes in your muffins.
Now, for a quick bread like this, we are following the muffin method. Why? The simple answer is that this recipe is pretty much a very large muffin. In fact, you could spoon out the batter into muffin cups and have yourself a real party.
However, the big thing is that we want the same muffin-like texture in our quick bread. We want a soft crumb with little gluten formation, no large holes, and a relatively heavy or dense structure. That’s the difference between cake and quick bread, or cupcakes and muffins, right? Muffins are hearty to serve as a meal on their own, but cupcakes are fluffy and airy to serve as a snacky dessert.
How to Get a Perfect Maple Pumpkin Bread Split
I have a hot tip for you before you get to baking. Maple pumpkin bread, like most quick breads, wants to crack down the middle on top. This is the hallmark of a nicely made loaf. But sometimes, that crack splits all wonky or off to one side.
Did you know you can control how your quick bread splits? Here’s my favorite tip. Coat the blade of a sharp knife or a clean offset spatula with oil. I use olive oil in my Misto (affiliate link in the toolkit list below) to spray both sides of the blade. Then, run the blade down the center of your loaf.
You only have to get about an inch into the batter, but “cut” all the way from one end to the other.
The batter will look like it has a small line of oil, but otherwise, it just fills back in and looks like nothing. However, as it bakes, your bread will crack right along that oiled cut. You’ll pull a perfectly split loaf of bread out of the oven every time!
Using Pepitas for a Crunchy Topping
The pepita topping is optional, but I really like it and recommend you give it a try. I use the roasted, salted kind that you can find wherever they keep nuts at the grocery store. Now, if you’re a huge fan, you can also mix some into the batter.
Since we’re trying hard to keep this healthy(ish), I used just a little bit for texture. Pepitas, if you don’t know, are little pumpkin seeds that are packed with healthy fats, magnesium, zinc, and iron. While the fat in these seeds is good for you, I prefer to eat it in moderation.
The Maple Pumpkin Bread Toolkit
Let’s go ahead and get started. Here are the tools you’ll need for your loaf:
Comment below if you have questions, concerns, or opinions. And tag me @ellejayathome on Instagram or Twitter if you share pictures from any of my recipes. I love to hear from you!
Maple Pumpkin Bread
Equipment
- 2 Medium Mixing Bowls
- Loaf Pan
- Fine mesh sieve
Ingredients
- 15 oz canned pumpkin purée
- ½ cup real maple syrup
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1¾ cups all purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp pink Himalayan salt
- 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
- ¼ cup roasted salted pepitas optional
- cooking spray (I recommend olive oil in a Misto)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven 350ºF. Spray your loaf pan with oil.
- In one bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, maple syrup, eggs, and vanilla.
- In another bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and pumpkin pie spice.
- Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and fold together until just incorporated. Do not overmix.
- Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan.
- For a perfect split after it bakes, spray a knife with oil and "cut" down the center. The batter will fill back in, but you may see a fine line of oil. When the loaf bakes, it will crack perfectly here.
- Optionally, sprinkle on the pepitas for decoration.
- Bake for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
- Cool for 5 minutes in the pan, and then remove the loaf to a cooling rack to cool completely.
