It’s long time since I have baked a quick bread. The last time I baked this for my friends and it was a hit. I had used bananas instead of eggs, so the bread tasted more like bananas. That’s the only reason I don’t like using bananas as an egg substitute because it’s flavor/smell will dominate the baked dish. Whether it’s a carrot cake or chocolate cake, it’s going to taste like a banana only. So this time I decided to use flax seed meal as the egg substitute.

What is a Quick Bread? As the name suggests, “Quick Breads” can be baked quickly, when compared to the traditional yeast breads. Quick breads are leavened with baking powder and/or baking soda, not yeast. So you can mix, bake and enjoy these baked goods in less time. Quick breads can be sweet or savory. One important thing to be noted while baking quick breads is, mixing the wet and dry ingredients only until moistened. Few lumps in the batter is fine, because over-mixing causes the gluten in the flour to develop and the result would be a coarse and tough bread.

Quick breads such as banana, zucchini and cranberry slice and taste best when served a day after baking. Wrap the cooled bread in foil or plastic wrap; leave at room temperature overnight. Use a serrated knife for breads that have fruits and/or nuts. Corn bread and coffee cakes are best served warm. (Source: The Taste of Home Baking Book)

I had some dried cranberries left after preparing these “no-bake” bars, so I wanted to use it before I could forget all about it and find it out after 3 months while cleaning the pantry. I also had 2 cranberry bread recipes in hand. One was the traditional yeast bread and another one a cranberry orange quick bread (from the book Baking for Dummies). Hands down my choice is the latter, because I’m not yet ready to bake with yeast. I have this preconceived notion that I cannot handle yeast, it’s difficult. But the quick bread required fresh cranberries which I didn’t have. So I came up with a recipe combining those 2 recipes, making few changes here and there. The bread came out quite decently.

This is my entry to the following events:
1. Suganya’s Vegan Ventures.
2. Mansi’s Vegetarian Thanksgiving Recipe Carnival. What is Thanksgiving without cranberries!
3. Egg Replacement Event – Flax Seed Meal hosted by me.

In a recent episode of Paula Deen’s show in Food TV, I saw her preparing a very easy peanut butter bread.  Since I’m not a big fan of peanut butter I thought of making the bread with almond butter instead.  The taste was amazing and you won’t believe how easy it is to prepare. 

Ingredients:
All purpose flour – 2 cups
Baking powder – 4 teaspoons
Salt – 1 teaspoon
Sugar – 1/3 cup
Toasted slivered almonds – 1/4 cup (optional)
Milk – 1.5 cups (I used 2% milk)
Almond Butter – 1/2 cup (I used Nature’s Promise Organic Almond Butter)

Procedure:
1.  Preheat oven to 375 F.
2.  Combine the dry ingredients and nuts.  Add milk to the mix and stir well to avoid lumps.

3.  Now add the almond butter.

4.  Mix well and continuously stir them.

5.  Pour into a 8×4x3 inch loaf pan.

6.  Top the batter with some toasted almond slices.

7.  Bake for approximately 50 minutes.

8.  Have this for breadfast with or without jam.  Enjoy!

My Notes:
1.  I happened to check the reviews in the food network site after baking the bread while writing this post.  The recipe was given only 3 stars and most of them had written that the bread was too dry and did not have enough peanut butter taste.  So they had suggested reducing the amount of baking powder, increasing the quantity of peanut butter, reducing the baking time, or using organic peanut butter because it has more oil content.  But I did not have any problem with my bread.  The only change I made was using almond butter and added a couple of toasted almonds.  The bread was very moist and sweet enough by itself.  Jam was also not necessary.  The almond butter did have a lot of oil in it, maybe that gave the moistness to the bread.

2.  Adding toasted nuts in the batter gave a very nice crunch.  But I wouldn’t top the bread with nuts the next time because they get toasted once again and some of the nuts became little bitter.  Not topping the bread with almonds will also facilitate easy slicing of the bread. 

3.  Cool completely before slicing the bread, so that it does not crumble.  I would even recommend to 2 to 3 hours of cooling. 

4.  Also check out the health benefits of almonds here.

Update:  My friend Roma from Bangalore, India has tried another cool version of the Almond Bread.  Since almond butter is not available in India she has used regular unsalted butter and has included powdered almonds and has got a very moist bread.  

It’s award time again:

Dear Uma of Essence of Andhra has passed me the Nice Matters Award.  Thank you very much for thinking of me Uma.

I would like to pass this to:

The Pritya duo
Shubha
Kumudha

“Nice Matters Award is for those bloggers who are nice people; good blog friends and those who inspire good feelings and inspiration. Also for those who are a positive influence on our blogging world.”

Another friend Rupa of Random Musings has passed me the Good Chat Blog Award.  Thank you very much Rupa. 

 I would like to pass this to:

DK
Mansi
Siri  

Kamala of Mom’s Recipes  had sent me Cinnamon for the Arusuvai Friendship Chain.  Thank you very much for including me in this chain and for sending me my favorite chocolates too.  When I sent her a mail after receiving the ingredient she replied back that she chose cinnamon because she thought that since I bake a lot I would be using it quite often.  So thoughtful of you Kamala.  Since this is such a special ingredient, I wanted to try something special and interesting.

I was going through a couple of books I have and found this recipe in the Baking for Dummies book, by Emily Nolan.  This was the first book I bought to learn to bake.  It has all the basic information on principles of baking, tools and techniques, a number of recipes, troubleshooting tips and lot more.

This bread is also called pull apart bread because it has to be pulled apart with your hands, instead of cutting it.

Ingredients:

First I will write down the ingredients as it is in the original recipe.  Later I will mention the changes I made.

Part 1:
All Purpose Flour 2 cups
Sugar 1/2 cup
Baking Powder 1 tablespoon
Salt 1/2 teaspoon
Cold Butter 5 tablespoons cut into 5 pieces.

Part 2:
Semisweet chocolate chips 1 cup
Milk 2/3 milk

Part 3:
Sugar 1/4 cup
Ground Cinnamon 1.5 teaspoons
Butter 3 tablespoons melted

Procedure:
1.  Preheat the oven to 350F.  Grease an 8-inch square baking pan.
2.  In a mixing bowl sift and combine all the ingredients mentioned in Part 1 except butter.
3.  Using a pastry blender or a few pulses of a food processor, cut the cold butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

4.  Stir in the Part 2 ingredients and combine to form a dough.

5.  The final dough would look like this.

6.  Divide the dough into 16 balls and place in the prepared baking pan.  The balls will touch.

7.  Drizzle the balls with the melted butter. 

7.  Combine the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon.  Sprinkle them with the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

8.  Bake for 30 minutes, until light brown.  Cool in the pan set on a wire rack before removing from the pan.

My Notes:
1.  For this recipe the butter has to be used straight from the refrigerator. 

2.  If you don’t have a food processor or a pastry blender you can use 2 knives or 2 forks to cut in the fat.  To use a pastry blender, mix the ingredients while cutting into the fats with the blender using a rocking, up and down bouncing motion.

3.  To divide the dough into 16 balls you can follow my method.  First divide the entire dough into 2 equal parts.  Roll the 2 parts into 2 separate logs.  Cut each log into 8 pieces.  While doing this, flour the surface generously.  I also sprayed both my hands with non stick oil spray, so handling the dough was easy.

4.  Similarly for greasing the baking pan, use the butter wrapper.

5.  I pretty much followed the recipe, but for the 6th step.  I melted the 3 tablespoons of butter in the microwave oven and that was really a lot of butter.  My husband was having “are you crazy to pour so much butter and sugar” look in his face.  So instead of using the entire butter and sugar as mentioned in the recipe, I followed his advice of just brushing the dough with little butter,  sprinkled very little sugar, but took another 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon, little cocoa and sprinkled over the balls of dough.

6.  I baked the bread for 32 minutes.  I would advice to cool it in the pan for atleast an hour before taking it out.  I tried to remove the bread after 30 minutes and the bread started to fall apart and crumble.  Anyway I managed to get 10-12 good pieces.  The bread was very moist inside, but a little bit dry on the tops.  I guess it was because I did not use the entire 3 tablespoons of butter as mentioned in the original recipe.  But the taste was phenomenal, with the melted chocolate chips, a hint of sweetness and the aroma of freshly ground cinnamon.

I was searching for zucchini recipes and found this one in Food Network’s site.  It’s by Paula Deen.  The original recipe yields 2 loaves, so I scaled down the ingredients to 50% to bake 1 loaf and used bananas to make it eggless. 

Ingredients:

(PART 1)
All Purpose Flour 1.5 cups
Baking Powder 1/4 tspn
Baking Soda 1/2 tspn
Cinnamon 1/4 tspn ( I used even little because I’m not a big fan of cinnamon)
Salt 1/2 tspn

(PART 2)
Zucchini peeled and grated, 1 cup (I used 1 medium zucchini, the gratings measured nearly 1.5 cups)
Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips 1/2 cup (I used mini chocolate chips)
Pecans 1/2 cup, chopped

(PART 3)
Vegetable Oil 1/2 cup
Granulated Sugar 3/4 cup
Bananas 2 medium size, mashed
Vanilla essence 1 tspn

Procedure:
1. Pre-heat the oven at 350 F.
2. Combine ingredients in Part 1 and sieve them.
3. To this add the ingredients in Part 2.
4. Combine ingredients in Part 3 in a blender/or cream it using an electric hand mixer.  I used my magic bullet blender to blend it.  Add this mixture to the above dry ingredients and mix it well.  You may add a little milk, if you feel that the mixture requires some more liquid.  I had to add a couple of tablespoons of milk because I increased the quantity of zucchini.
5. Pour it in a greased bread loaf pan.

6. Bake it at 350F for 50 min or until a skewer inserted in the middle of the loaf comes out clean.
7. Cool the bread in the pan for 30 minutes before transferring it to a wire rack.  Wait for another 30-45 minutes before slicing the bread.

The bread is very moist and tasty.  Click the images for a bigger view.

My Notes:
1. This is similar to the carrot cake recipe, but uses zucchini and chocolate chips instead.  Next time I will add both carrots and zucchinis.

2. I feel that the Magic Bullet Blender is very versatile.  I bought it 2 years back to puree steamed vegetables and fruits in small quantities for my infant son.  But it does a lot more.  The recipe booklet which comes along with the blender is also very useful.  I have made muffins and soups as mentioned in the recipe book and it has come out very well also.  Even in the above recipe I add all the ingredients in Part 3 in the blender’s big jar and gave it a few pulses and it’s ready within few minutes.  I find it more easy than using an electric hand mixer.

3. Use Vegan chocolate chips/carob chips to make this bread100% vegan.

I think this will be the easiest bread I will ever bake.  There is no yeast action, no eggs or even butter.  It’s as easy as mixing dough for chapathis.

Ingredients:
Click here for the ingredients and the recipe.  The bread requires 1/2 cup of wheat germ, I guess it can be replaced with whole wheat flour itself.  I also added 1 tablespoon flaxseed meal.

My Notes:
1. While combining the dry ingredients, don’t forget to seive the all purpose flour, whole wheat flour and baking soda to avoid uncooked lumps in the baked bread.  I usually seive them, but this time I totally forgot it and found some lumps in the bread.
2. Similarly while adding honey to the buttermilk, keep stirring it using a whisk or fork, until the honey dissolves in the buttermilk.  Since I had to take a picture, I added the honey and just left it.  When I was done taking the photo, I found that the honey had stuck to the bottom of the vessel and had lumped.  So I had to use my muscle to dissolve it.  Also before measuring the honey, spray the tablespoon with some non stick cooking spray and then pour the honey into the spoon.  By doing this the honey will easily pour out from the spoon without sticking.
3. Combine the dry ingredients and wet ingredients.  The recipe mentions to turn the dough onto a floured surface to shape it into a circle and then transfer to a baking sheet. 

I don’t know whether I did not flour the surface well or what, this step was a bit messy and I was not able to shape it properly.  So I sprayed both my hands with vegetable oil and removed the dough from the surface and transferred it to the greased baking sheet and shaped it in the baking sheet itself.  This was very easy. 

Bake it for 15 minutes at 425F and for another 15 min at 400F.  Let it cool for atleast 30 minutes before you can cut it.  The bread has a nice nutty smell and flavor. 

Enjoy it with your favorite jam!

This is my entry to Paulchen’s Foodblog event BBD #9, Bread with Oats.