Culinary mishaps: Pumpkin bread edition Fran Loomis/Pixabay/Creative Commons To begin, I am by no means a baker. But for someone who is not a baker, I can get unnecessarily confident in the kitchen. Sometimes, this overconfidence has its consequences — consequences that can sometimes come in the form of bad pumpkin bread. This all began when I decided to make a pumpkin bread recipe for my Eating Berkeley article this week. Since I make banana bread pretty often, I figured it’s essentially the same thing (spoiler alert: it’s not). So, I made assumptions about the recipe I should not have. The result was — as probably predicted by everyone around me except myself — not very good. This ultimately led me to throw the whole loaf away and starting again with an actual recipe. But, here is what I learned from my mistakes.