Pumpkin Loaf - Mom

I am in the worst kind of heaven right now.  I have two freshly baked pumpkin loaves on my counter, they smell fantastic, better than fantastic, they smell deliriously, mouth-wateringly, head-rushingly, drool inducingly amazing, and I have sit in this blissful, pumpkiny, spicey cloud of aroma while I wait for them to cool before I can cut into them.  Other fruit or vegetable based cakes should be ashamed of their own existance, banana bread should go hide itself for being insufficient, zucchini loaf should tremble from its own inadequacies, and carrot cake should resign itself to being a waste of both carrots and cake, pumpkin loaf makes me wonder why people even bother with lesser loaves, but still I have to wait.

This is, fyi, another one of my mom's "saboteur" style sharing efforts.  There are some obvious errors in her email, eggs are listed twice, under no circumstances would she pour that much oil into a measuring cup and think yup I'll add all that in, and a very inconvenient spelling error could have someone without the sensory memory of this cake burned into her olfactory system mistaking cinnamon for cardamom with disastrous results and there's no way she would ever be so stingy with the spices.  She also limited the total of her instructions to "bake in a greased and floured loaf pan for 50 min at 350^" which would have a less intrepid baker shying away from it due to the complete lack of direction on how to make the batter.

Pumpkin Loaf

In a stand mixer, whisk together until pale and the mix falls in ribbons from the beaters when you raise them
4 eggs
3 cups of sugar

add in and whisk until smooth
1/2 cup vegetable oil (flavourless like sunflower or canola)
1 small can of pumpkin (that's 1 3/4 cups - I measured it on the way out of the can)
1/3 can of water (use the pumpkin can to measure)
               if you puree up your own fresh pumpkin and it is already quite watery,
               use 2 cups of pumpkin and omit the extra water

sift together all your dry ingredients then add to the wet and mix until just incorporated
3 1/2 cups of flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cloves
3 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp allspice

Pour the mixture into 2 loaf tins (this is a double recipe, you can half it but then you have to use half the can of pumpkin and do something with the other half, just make two loaves and freeze one for later you won't be disappointed).

Bake in a preheated oven at 350^F (177^C) for 50 minutes, poke it with a long skewer to check if it's done in the middle and if not put it back in for 5 minutes at a time until it is.

Just a note, it should be a bit darker on the outside and it shouldn't be so mountainous in shape but my oven was at 325^ in error.  I have been suspecting that my oven has been running hot compared to the temperature dial, to check I bought an proper internal thermonitor to get a more accurate gauge and I was right, but today I mis-read the thermonitor and ended up too low.  So as the loaves cooked unusually slowly, the centres bulged ever higher in what was worryingly threatening to become a volcano of warm raw batter and it took much longer to bake.  But after some nail biting and several extensions of the cooking time it did eventually bake and it didn't spill over the sides and fuse to the tins, so alls well that ends well, get the butter out it's gotta be time to cut a slice now.

Look at that beauty!