One of the things I love about being back in California is the wide variety of fruit and produce available here. It is December and we have all kinds of vegetables growing in the garden. I love walking around the neighborhood and looking at all of the different fruit trees. One of my favorite trees this time of year is the persimmon tree. The leaves fall off leaving hundreds of deep orange persimmons hanging from the bare branches. It is beautiful, especially against a gray sky.

Even better, since the persimmon trees around here tend to be quite prolific, people who have the trees tend to be generous in sharing their crop. This is lucky for me because I love the sweet squishiness of a ripe Hachiya persimmon. They are great plain, but even better when baked into this buttery, boozy persimmon bread.

When I was growing up my family didn’t bake all that much, but we did make this persimmon bread every fall. Our neighbors down the street had two huge persimmon trees. The first year my mom asked them if we could have a few persimmons. (I think she brought us with her because it is always better to ask to pick fruit from someone’s tree if you have a few cute little kids with you.) The neighbors told her that we could take all of them because they didn’t like persimmons. Needless to say, we took them and made a ton of persimmon bread. We brought the neighbors a loaf of the bread as a thank you. The following year when we went back to ask for persimmons again they told us that we could take some, but that they had changed their mind about persimmons. Thanks to that bread they realized they liked them and from then on they wanted to keep most of their persimmons for themselves.

If that doesn’t speak highly enough of this persimmon bread I don’t know what does. It is delicious. Sweet enough to be dessert but not too sweet to enjoy as an afternoon snack with a cup of tea. It also freezes really well, which makes it great thing to make ahead and give away as holiday gifts.