It's easy to open a can of pumpkin and use it in your favorite recipe but it's nice to use fresh. It's yours, you made it, and it likely has a higher vitamin content. Maybe your pumpkins came from the garden but even if you bought them at the farmers' market, you can make fresh pumpkin puree for less than canned from the store.
While we're biased toward fresh pumpkin, quite frankly, in many recipes we have a hard time telling the difference between fresh and canned. And we often use commercially canned pumpkin for the convenience.
There are two ways to use fresh pumpkin in your baking: grated or pureed. If you add grated pumpkin, you will have flecks of deep orange color and the bits of pumpkin tend to give a chewier texture. The other way is to add pumpkin pur