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