When the weather finally gets cooler, and pumpkins appear on everyone’s porches, I am ready for all things pumpkin-flavored (except for pumpkin spice coffee drinks; for some reason I don’t like the flavoring in those).  As I’ve mentioned before, I try to limit gluten-free baked carb-type goodies during the week for health reasons.  So, I was trying to find a healthy “treat” carb to eat on the weekends and that can also be frozen to control portion sizes.  With the weather finally turning Fall-like, I decided to try a gluten-free pumpkin spice bread.  I knew that if I baked up a loaf, I could slice it into individual portion sizes that would last a long time in my freezer.  I also had an overripe banana sitting in my fruit bowl, so I decided to use that up in place of an egg, which works well in baked goods like this.

To get started with my dry ingredients, I pulled out the regular suspects:  gluten-free flour, gluten-free rolled oats, baking soda, salt, white sugar, and a bunch of warm fall spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger.  You just can’t go wrong with that flavor combination.  It’s the base for any yummy spicy baked good.

The wet ingredients were a little more interesting than the dry ingredients.   In a separate bowl from the dry ingredients, I combined about 10 oz. of pumpkin puree (basically I think there was maybe 1/4 cup left at the bottom of the 15 oz can), vegetable oil, unsweetened applesauce (instead of using so much oil), 1 egg, and a mashed banana to replace a second egg.  I had the one very ripe banana that I peeled and mashed until I had 1/4 cup of mashed banana.  For my medium-sized banana, this was about 2/3 of the whole banana.

I mixed together the dry ingredients so that everything was evenly distributed.  For the wet ingredients, I thoroughly mixed everything together because there were a lot of potentially clumpy ingredients – the pumpkin puree and the mashed banana.  Once the dry and wet ingredients were mixed in individual bowls, I combined them into one bowl.

I poured my batter into a large 9 x 5 inch bread loaf (ceramic) pan.  You can make two loaves with smaller loaf pans instead of the giant loaf pan that I used, or make a bunch of mini loaves.

I didn’t stop with just adding the batter to the loaf pan, though.  I wanted topping!  So, I made a simple mix of about 1/8 cup of brown sugar (I just eyeballed half of a 1/4 cup measuring cup) and 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon.  I sprinkled it all over the loaf and placed it into a 350 degree oven for 60 minutes.

At the end of the 60 minutes, the topping was nice and crunchy.  If you use smaller loaf pans, you should be able to decrease the cooking time.  I let the bread cool in the pan for a few minutes, then carefully turned it out onto a cooling rack.  When it was totally cool, I was able to slice it into 8 thick pieces of bread, which I individually plastic wrapped and put into a ziplock bag for the freezer.   Enjoy your taste of Fall!