To Blog: Why? What? and Pumpkin Coconut Sour Cherry Bread

So here I am again a few days later than I thought I would post this because I've been thinking about many things relative to this blog, the most salient being: why blog? Or more precisely, why blog about food in my case.

There are many posts out there about why blog. Some of them make a lot more sense to me than others but they're all valid to their own authors, and in the end I have to find the reason for myself. A while back I had whole new plans for this blog which all revolved around food, and of course as things are wont to do, things changed. Then I decided that I would post photographs and other things and write fewer recipes and that it would become a more general blog, and that got under way, but somehow I was driven back to more recipes and fewer other things than food, basically only food.
The thing is, dear readers, that I really love food, but I'm not sure I love blogging about it anymore.

When I started blogging about food almost three years ago, I'd been blogging for a year on another platform and was a bit frustrated with my blog because it was general and I felt the lack of focus meant that it was more of a journal than anything else, and between you and me, I've never been much of a journaler. At all. Then one day while doing a recipe search, for a cupcake recipe of all things, I discovered food blogs and started perusing them and loving them, because I love food, and after a while I thought to myself that the simplest way to create focus in my blogging would be to blog about food. Thus Saffron & Blueberry was born.



There have been lots of ups and downs in my life since then, lots of periods where I didn't blog much, the crux of the matter being that, when it comes down to it, I love food but I don't think I love blogging about food, not to the extent that I want every post to be about food anymore. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I am trying to get back into work which is completely unrelated to food and which most of the time commands so much focus from me that the blog, while I love it, will end up being something that takes time away from the other parts of my life.

And so to more practical considerations:
- It turns out that while I do love to write, the creative writing that I've done has nearly always been short stories or essays, and I don't enjoy writing recipes. If you've been reading this blog and it hasn't struck you, I practically never claim credit for recipes I blog about. Even when I've adapted them all both in ingredients and wording to make them my own, I don't consider myself a person with her own recipes. And for the most part writing about food does not come easily to me the way it does to someone like Jamie, who simply has a river of words to say about it.
- I do like the fact that I can come back for reference to recipes I've blogged here like having my own cookbook, but the truth is, I'm just as happy to bookmark someone else's recipe that's worked well for me and go back to their blog to look it up. Or copy-paste it into a word document (of which I have many) in case that blog leaves the tendrils of the interwebs. 
- I don't have the slightest desire to write a cookbook, be a recipe developer, become a food writer, become a food stylist, or any of the other more obvious reasons a lot of people blog about food, irrespective of whether or not they'll succeed. As I said above, I don't feel the need to catalog recipes I use here, it's far simpler to catalog them in my own documents without writing about them.
In fact, re: food styling, next post will be a manifesto purely about the not food styling I do for this blog.
- I love the community of foodies and friends that I've found through blogging about food, but now that I've found you all, do I need to keep blogging about food for us to remain friends? I think not.
- Actually, the one thing I really don't mind about food blogging is taking photographs of the food because I love photography and taking pictures of anything you're not familiar with photographing is an opportunity to learn, but then the answer seems more clearly to me to be to simply not write posts to accompany the photography, at least not most of the time. Some food blogs do quite well with this format.

So what's the answer?
Do I continue and diversify?
Does this blog simply become a photoblog?
Will you all be very unhappy if I no longer post recipes?
Anyone else struggle with this and have an idea?
Anyone have an opinion about this in particular or a reason for me to stay the course?
I've spoken to some friends about this and everyone has had really good input for me, but now I'm wondering, as a blog reader who most likely does not know me, is there something I should think about that I haven't mentioned?

So while you ponder this and find the answer for me, I suggest you make this pumpkin coconut sour cherry bread, which is one of the best (and easiest) snack loaves e-ver. I used canned pumpkin because it's long past the season for pumpkin anymore here and I had a can that someone had brought me from the US to use. This is an adaptation of Lena Corwin's recipe for pumpkin cranberry bread via the good graces of Kristina Gill over on Design Sponge and includes coconut milk, ground coconut and sour cherries; I also used half light brown flour and half all purpose flour, and used raw sugars while reducing the sugar by one third, although I might even go so far as to try to reduce it by half next time.


Pumpkin Coconut Sour Cherry Bread
adapted from Lena Corwin's recipe for Pumpkin Cranberry Bread on Design Sponge

For one standard loaf pan + two mini loaf pans
425g (1 3/4 cup) canned pumpkin = one small can
100g (7 Tbsp) butter, melted
150g (2/3 cup) coconut milk
60ml (1/4 cup) water (60ml)
4 eggs
225g (1 3/4 cup) all purpose flour
225g (1 3/4 cup) light brown flour
200g (1 cup) raw granulated sugar
200g (1 cup) light muscovado sugar
200g (7 oz) toasted ground (or shredded) coconut
{ 2.5g (1/2 tsp) cinnamon +
   5g (1 tsp) four-spice }
OR
{ 5g (1/2 tsp) cinnamon +
   2.5g (1/2 tsp) nutmeg +
   2.5g (1/2 tsp) ground cloves +
   2.5g (1/2 tsp) fine ground black pepper }
10g (2 tsp) baking soda
10g (2 tsp) baking powder
2.5g (1/2 tsp) salt
120g (1 cup) chopped dried sour cherries

- Heat the oven to 180˚C (350˚F).
- Grease the loaf pans (although I actually forgot to do this and they came out fine due to the fat of the butter and coconut milk). 
- In a large bowl, mix the pumpkin, butter, coconut milk, water and eggs.
- In a smaller bowl mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, ground coconut, spices, baking soda, baking powder and salt) and the sour cherries
- Mixing by hand (and preferably with a wooden spoon), combine the dry and wet ingredients. Mix just until the batter is combined.
- Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pans, filling them up about half way.
- Bake for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.