Nutty Pumpkin Yeast Bread

What better suits the thanksgiving dinner than a pumpkin looking pumpkin bread complete with pumpkin seeds inside!! Cutting slits and sticking in the leftover stem from my pumpkin, the bread turned out to be more like a real pumpkin than I'd originally planned. Everyone loved it. (Photo by Helen L. M.)

• Ready In: 3 hrs
• Serves: 8
• Yields: 16 slices

Ingredients

• 1  cup pumpkin, juice 240g (blend equal parts of water and pumpkin puree and measure out exactly 1 cup )
• 1  tablespoon water, to adjust dough wetness
• 4  teaspoons  oil, 56g (half vegetable oil and half butter)
• 3  cups bread flour, 360g (up to half can be wwf)
• 1 1⁄4 teaspoons salt
• 2  teaspoons sugar
• 2 1⁄2 teaspoons  yeast
• 1⁄2 cup sesame seeds
• 1⁄2 cup  pumpkin seeds

Directions

1. Make pumpkin juice by blending water with pumpkin puree or steamed pumpkin flesh with skin on (I include the seeds too because my blender is sharp.).
2. Put into the bread machine the juice, oil, flour, salt, sugar, yeast, and sesame seeds. Use the dough cycle.
3. Knead into the resulting dough the pumpkin seeds by hand. (Else the green skins will fall off in the machine's spinning.).
4. Form a ball, insert saved stem, with scissors cut slits 3 times (every 20 minutes) at the same places during one hour of proofing. Spray water from time to time.
5. After it's become doubled in size (mine grew sideways,) spray some water and bake at 180degrees 20-30min. (Or until the color is right and inside measures 80 degrees Celsius.).