Okay, so this isn't really a true Surprise Me Sunday recipe. I have been baking A to Z Bread for many, many years. It's a recipe my grandma clipped out of a newspaper and has been handed down to my mom, then me. It's a basic sweet bread recipe where you insert 2 cups of pretty much any fruit or veggie. The surprise part is how much flexibility you have with the recipe. I rarely make it the same way twice.
I'm sure you've heard the expression "Cooking is an art but baking is a science." And that probably holds true for many recipes. When you bake following the recipe exactly tends to be very important. But honestly, you cannot mess up this bread no matter how much you mess with it. (Well, maybe you could ruin it if you completely forgot an ingredient.) I make substitutions ALL THE TIME based on what I have on hand or how healthy I want to be. No white flour? Substitute wheat. No white sugar? Substitute brown. Want to avoid the oil? Substitute yogurt, applesauce, etc. Or make it a combination of the two. Batter too dry? Add some milk or juice. Experiment with additional spices. I've done all of those things to the recipe and while it may alter the texture of the finished product some (especially if you do all yogurt instead of oil), it's still very, very tasty. And easy.
It's called A to Z Bread because the original recipe had fruit/veg suggestions for almost every letter of the alphabet. Here are the ones I commonly use. Feel free to ask for additional letters if you want but you're really only limited by your imagination.
Apples, grated
Applesauce
Bananas, mashed (Isa loves to mash them with her hands for me!)
Carrots, grated
Pears, chopped
Pumpkin, canned
Zuccini, grated
A to Z Bread
3c flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
1c oil
2c sugar
2c fruit or veg
3 tsp vanilla
Preheat oven to 325. Grease & flour 2 lg loaf pans OR grease 2 muffin tins.
Sift together dry ingredients and set aside.
Beat eggs. Add oil & sugar; cream well.
Add fruit/veg and vanilla to egg/oil/sugar mixture.
Add dry ingredients. Mix until just combined.
Pour batter into pans/tins.
Bake 1 hour for loaves (until knife in center comes out clean) or ~25 min for muffins.
1 comment:
I'm pretty excited to try this - I've been wanting to make a cinnamon-raisin bread (but use dried cranberries instead), but the recipes are pretty darn complicated OR call for, oh, the entire container of flour, so this will be perfect!
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