Recipe 40: Sultana, Date & Apricot Loaf

This recipe was basically a normal bread recipe with fruit thrown into it, so a real battle of savoury versus sweet! What will be the outcome of this?

It starts off with the usual mixing of the ingredients (by hand!), the only difference was that the flour consisted of strong white, rye and wholemeal. So a proper mix, even with the dreaded rye flour but there was enough of the others to stop it causing any trouble to the loaf for me! After 10 minutes of kneading in the heat wave, it was time to leave the dough to rise!

After an hour rise, time to measure out the fruit for the loaf and kneading it all into the already nicely risen dough, which is always very sad to me! When the fruit it spread evenly across the dough, time to put it back into the bowl and leave to rise for yet another hour!

The wait is over! Though another begins, it's time to knock the air out of the dough and then shape into an oval and it's time to prove! I think I am having issues with shaping, the dough never seems as smooth and strong as it should and when I try to do the oval shape, it just looks like a huge block with odd ends!

After an hour or when the dough springs back when you poke it, it's time to bake at last! Before you bake though (getting ahead of myself) you rub some flour into the dough and slash with a knife then in the oven it goes!

Reviews? Family not so keen on this. I think maybe because unlike usual bread with fruit in, it's sweet but this recipe was purely bread with fruit in it, no extra sugar added or anything so I can understand the conflict of taste! 

Recipe 39: Fruit Loaf

So after 6 months of bread, I finally got to use some icing sugar again! Yes, Fruit Loaf is still bread but you know what I mean! It was pretty much cake with yeast in it!

So there was lots of ingredients involved in this one, the usual suspects: flour, yeast, salt & water. Then to add into this mix were milk, sugar, eggs and of course lots of different kinds of fruit! Off the top of my head, there was mixed peel, sultanas, raisins, apricot and I think a few I have missed – all of them dried.

This recipe required the dough hook (as you may know, I only have an electric hand whisk) and I thought I better listen to what the recipe says as it looked like the mixture wasn't going to be as thick as usual. It sort of done the job, never perfect as always! Fast forward to two weeks later when I had to use my hand whisk to bake 84 cup cakes and it dies on me! So had a panic and rush out to get a new one! This means I will never be attempting to use the hand whisk as a replacement dough hook again!

Anyway, back to the Fruit Loaf! The dough is then left to rise in the bowl to mix in so it was pretty messy! I was worried when I looked at it over an hour later than it hadn't risen well but comparing the pictures afterwards, it definitely did!

In the meanwhile, I also prepared the icing sugar and grated the zest of a lemon and mixed them together.

After the rising, it was time to shape them which was very difficult because it's so sticky but eventually managed to get them into some kind of formed shape and then left them to prove again.

Once proved, it's at last time to bake! The smell throughout the house is amazing, it smelt just like Christmas! When the loaves come out of the oven, I left to cool for around 5-10 minutes and then dribbled the prepared icing sugar over them, which fell down the loaves so lovely and melted into them!

Reviews? Everyone loved these! I served these up on Father's Day which went down a treat, some said it was the best bake yet! I think these will be done again at some point, maybe around Christmas!