Pumpkin-Date Cream Cheese Swirl Bread
A twist on a recipe from Baking in America by Greg Patent, this is a wonderful 9x5 inch pumpkin bread with extra character from sweet dates and a cream cheesecake like topping. The serving size is listed as 12, but you can cut the slices as thin or thick as you like.
Servings 12 slices
Cost 5
Ingredients
Cream Cheese Mixture
- 4 oz cream cheese, softened (do not use light) (114 grams)
- 2 tablespoons sugar (25 grams)
- ½ teaspoon vanilla
- 1 large egg, room temperature
Pumpkin Bread Batter
- 2 tablespoons butter, softened, for greasing pan
- 1 ⅔ cup all-purpose or white whole grain flour (210 grams)
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- ⅜ teaspoon allspice
- ¼ teaspoon ginger
- ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 ¼ cups dark brown sugar (260 grams)
- 2 large eggs
- 1 cup canned pumpkin (240 grams)
- ¼ cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup chopped dates
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- In a small mixing bowl, beat together softened cream cheese, sugar and vanilla. Add egg and beat until smooth. Set aside.
- Rub a 9x5 inch loaf pan generously with butter, preferably salted. You can line the bottom with a strip of parchment if you'd like, or skip that if trust all the butter.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and spices. Set aside.
- In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for 1 minute. Add sugar and whisk for another minute, then whisk in the oil and the pumpkin. With a heavy duty scraper, stir in the dates and the flour mixture. The batter will be pretty thick.
- Spread the pumpkin batter in the buttered pan.
- Pour the cream cheese mixture (it will be fairly fluid) over the pumpkin batter. Carefully swirl a little of the thick pumpkin batter up and over the cream cheese batter. You'll still have a big layer of liquidy cream cheese batter on top, but you want to see some swirls of pumpkin batter through it.
- Bake at 350 for about 60 minutes. Let cool for 20 minutes in the pan, then carefully loosen and remove from the pan.
Notes
The substitute for pumpkin pie spice is ½ teaspoon cinnamon (use in addition to the cinnamon already in the recipe), ⅛ teaspoon cloves, ¼ teaspoon ginger, ⅛ teaspoon nutmeg.