Mix Dry Ingredients for Pumpkin Bread

Mix Dry Ingredients for Pumpkin Bread
Hi! I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I am going to show you how to make this delicious spicy pumpkin bread. Our next step is to mix up our dry ingredients. Particularly when you have a bunch of smaller amounts being added to the flour, it is really important to mix everything before incorporating any wet ingredients. The wet ingredients will cause things to start pumping and then they don't get mixed quite as well. So first we need two cups of flour. You will want to gently scoop the flour into the measuring cup. You don't want it packed down; you don't want to have too much in there. If you have too much flour, then it will end up being a little bit dryer than you want. If you don't have enough flour, then things will be too wet and probably won't set as well. For smaller amounts such as just two cups at a time, it is fine using a volume measurement of the cups. However if you are planning on doing larger amounts or you are going to do multiple batches at once, it is also useful to use a small kitchen scale instead. It is a little bit more accurate for something like flour where the density is going to depend on the humidity in the air and various other factors. We have the flour and we are going to add just a half a teaspoon of salt and pour that very carefully because you don't want to get too much salt in there. The salt just adds a nice contrast to the sweetness. We are going to need a half a teaspoon of baking powder and then one teaspoon of baking soda. I am actually going to use the half teaspoon twice so that I have the unspoiled one teaspoon for my cinnamon. Now with baking powder and soda, you want to make sure they are both fresh. If you are using stuff that has expired, then you are not going to get as good of a rise as you otherwise would have. We are going to add one teaspoon of cinnamon. It is always nice to have lots of spices in your holiday breads. Particularly nice in the winter time and there is something about the spice that just makes things seem a little bit warmer even if it is not temperature wise. We are going to add a quarter of a teaspoon each of our remaining spices. So that is a quarter of a teaspoon of cloves and all spice. Like I said earlier if you don't have all of the different spices and you have pumpkin pie spice instead, then that is fine. Just use about two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice instead of all the other spices, then some ginger and last but not least, some nutmeg. If you want to add more of one spice and less of another, that is fine too. With spices, you can definitely adjust for your own taste. We are just going to use our wooden spoon and stir everything together. You can tell when it is well mixed when instead of having white as your main color, you start having a more speckled model brown look to the flour.