Life in the Cheese Drawer

i think my baking powder is shot. this is the second recipe i’ve made out of ATK that should’ve risen at least a tiny bit more than it did (the first was white cake). bread like this should not be insanely flat. 
anyway.
i roasted and pureed some pie pumpkins last weekend, and i was itching to make something pumpkiny out of them. why not see what america’s test kitchen had for pumpkin bread?
turns out, it has something DELICIOUS.

the weird thing about this recipe? you cook the pumpkin with the spices over the stove before you mix it into the recipe. i think this is twofold reasoning: canned pumpkin might be a little more watery than fresh, and it infuses the spices into the pumpkin while bringing out pumpkin flavors.

no overload on spices; the recipe just called for minimal amounts of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. a couple weird additions: cream cheese and buttermilk.
now, i may have screwed up this recipe and been my own undoing. i “made” buttermilk with whole milk and vinegar (totally acceptable!!) AND i substituted cottage cheese for the cream cheese (the internet told me to do it). (i didn’t want to go to the store again.)

add a nice, crumbly topping, and into the oven it goes. i baked this for more than the allotted time, and it was still a little gooey in the center. was this due to my weird substitutions? am i just horrible at baking breads like these? is the skewer a liar? THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

see? a little weirdly flat-ish. and sunken in the center. i think i have to get new baking powder and see if that fixes it.

but DANG if this isn’t some of the best pumpkin bread i’ve eaten. you can really tell it’s PUMPKIN, not just a conduit for pumpkinesque spices. 
point: ATK