Fabulous Chocolate Sweet Potato Bread

I adapted a pumpkin bread recipe to come up with this bread which has rapidly become a family favorite.  Of course you can also use canned pumpkin in it, or cooked, pureed butternut or acorn squash.  I intend to use all of these, but am finishing up a bunch of sweet potatoes.  If it turns out properly, this bread has a moist gingerbread texture with a spicy, chocolate, sweet potato flavor.

For an end amount of TWO  CUPS mashed sweet potatoes, scrub 6-8 medium sized potatoes, place them in a baking dish and pierce the skins with a fork, then drizzle grape seed or olive oil over them and bake in a 400 degree oven until well done, about an hour.

This should make a nice moist sweet potato.  I bake extra potatoes to be certain I have enough for the recipe and to eat.  Cool until you can handle them, then peel (our four dogs love the skins) and mash the orange flesh with a fork.  If you use pumpkin or squash, it’s a thinner consistency and will affect how much hot water you use in the recipe.  Also,  I recently purchased those huge pale orange sweet potatoes (which I suspect were yams) and they had a very dry consistency.  Not as good.

In a large bowl mix 2/3 cup of coconut oil (you may use another oil but coconut is healthful, assuming you get the Good kind, and works really well in this recipe) with 1 1/3 cups of sugar (I used raw) and blend in 4 large eggs (my daughter in law has her own chickens).  Add the mashed potatoes to this mixture and blend well.  Now for the secret ingredient,  add 1/3 cup of black strap molasses.  Add 1/3 –1/2 cup of very hot water, unless mixture is quite thin.  I reserve the water and add it as I blend in the dry ingredients as needed, more or less.  This mixture is difficult to stir if you don’t have enough liquid, or if your potatoes are dry.

In a separate bowl, mix 3 1/3 cups flour with 1/2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp cloves,  1 tsp cinnamon, and 1 1/2 tsp salt (I use sea salt) and 1/3 cup pure cocoa powder.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, blending well.  If you reserved the hot water add it now, then add 1/2 (or more) of a large bag of dark chocolate chips.  My latest batch is missing the chips because we ate them all, so the photograph is minus the chips.

Pour the dough into two well greased bread pans, half the mix into each one, and bake at 350 for approximately one hour.  Until you can stick a thin knife into the bread and it comes out clean.  Leave the bread in the pans to cool, then slide a knife around the sides to loosen the loaves before turning them over on a rack and tap the bottom of the pan (gently) to get them out.   Good luck and enjoy!