I'm not sure where I went wrong. I'm hoping some of you have specific ideas. Globally, one answer is I messed with the recipe, but that's why I made a test. I'll be making it for real the week before Thanksgiving. I have a lot of experience with cakes and quickbreads--I can make lovely cakes without a recipe-- but I'm not sure what happened here, and I usually make sour cornpone, rather than fluffy cornbread.

I used a recipe from Serious Eats as a template. Here it is modified with what I actually did. It tastes great--not too sweet and kind of irresistible, even with the problem--and the overall texture of the ingredients is right. The tester came out very very clean in two places, and the edges were all nicely brown, the top, tapped, felt done. Perhaps not as cracked as the original recipe said. The center is dense and gummy like underbaked, but it doesn't taste underbaked. We did cut out a corner while it was warm to see what it was like warm, and the center texture could just be that it fell, but it's not wet, nor dished in, like fallen cake (though my experience with fallen is mostly from on purpose overloading the honey in honey cake to make it fall, which was my father's favorite). So the answer might just be bake it a little longer and don't cut it before it's cool, but I thought maybe someone with more cornbread experience could think of other things I goofed up on.

I baked it in an enameled Emile Henry square 9"-ish ceramic dish.

I also was thinking with all that sour milk to activate it, I should add a little baking soda for extra fluff. Yes? No?

Pumpkin Cornbread

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups red cornmeal

1/8 cup white sugar

1-2 TBSP raw cane sugar

1 cup ABC+ flour (CM malted barley added, hard red wheat, Protein / 11.5%, Ash / 0.60%)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup lightly roasted fresh pumpkin purée

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup sour rich milk

2 large eggs

1 tablespoon unsalted butter to grease pan

Directions

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position, and preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.

3. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar, pumpkin, and milk until combined. Stir in dry ingredients.

4. Place butter in 9" cast iron skillet (or square dish) and place in preheated oven for 2 minutes, or until butter is melted. Take skillet out of oven and pour in batter, smoothing top. Bake until top is golden and cracked and a cake tester inserted into the middle comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Let cool before cutting.