Every Christmas, and often Thanksgiving, I bake a pumpkin bread that is wonderful! I do not remember the first time I made it, but it has been our holiday cake ever since. I know that my favorite flour is Hudson Cream, and I blogged once about being on a trip in Canada, going into a specialty cooking store, and finding a special promotion selling Hudson Cream Flour. Sometimes we do take for granted special things in our own communities.
Doing my research for this blog I learned that Kansas Wheat is regarded as superior. We are the top producer of hard winter wheat in the U.S., known for high protein and strong gluten content, making it ideal for yeast breads and commercial baking. Because of our reputation, we export to over 100 countries for making premium flour.
Our nearby Stafford County Flour Mill is generally ranked at the top. There are also other respected mills in Kansas, and part of that reason for respect is the specific food safety standards and labeling requirements set by the Kansas Department of Agriculture. First are the safety standards Equipment, Labeling, and Packaging Process steps. I shared only the headings, but the details are strict. The next time you select your baking flour, feel proud of the respect we should feel for Kansas farmers.
That being true, I hope the story I am about to share has nothing to do with our Kansas flour! I prefer to assume that the flour in this case did not come from Kansas, or the culprit wasn't in the flour. There are many ingredients in that cake. I'm sure it had nothing to do with Kansas! Perhaps the problem was not in the flour at all! Maybe it was in the canned pumpkin...or all those spices. Who knows. That recipe has many ingredients.
I certainly do not want you to think I am the kind of hostess who would serve cake that had anything bad to our guests. Oh dear! Maybe this blog wasn't a very good idea, but I suppose it is too late now not to finish!.
The bottom line of the story is that all of the ingredients were mixed, and I was pouring the batter into the baking pans when the pieces pictured above were noticed. For those of you who might have reason to eat my cooking...bear in mind how much we love that pumpkin bread, how hard I worked making it, and the important fact that we were not inviting guests. Now that all of that is understood, I confess that I poured all of the cake mixture back into the bowl where I could search for even the smallest pieces to be certain I had found all of them. Only then did I bake the cakes. Despite the uninvited addition to the recipe, we ate every bit of that cake!
I hope this story gave you a chuckle, even if you have never faced the choice between throwing everything out and starting over or carefully searching for unwelcome things in your cake!
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