Growing up, I have fond memories of eating Pepperidge Farm Raisin Cinnamon Swirl Bread. It has always been a comfort food for me. A nice treat, especially yummy when toasted with butter. Not surprisingly my daughter also loves a slice of raisin bread in the morning. Recently my husband noted that the bread has HFCS in it. No! I guess I had never really checked the label of the bread since it had been such a staple in my life. Sure enough, he was right. 4th ingredient from the top (although, it was a bit challenging to figure out what number ingredient it was since the first ingredient, Unbromated unbleached enriched wheat flour, is followed up by a bracket containing all of its ingredients, nine in total). And thus began my search for a recipe to make my own cinnamon raisin bread. When it comes to cooking and looking for recipes I try to keep two things in mind - 1) cook a lot and freeze the extras, and 2) find a recipe that has been reviewed and has high ratings. There is no reason to waste time, energy and food on a recipe that will not deliver. Therefore I was psyched to find Cinnamon Raisin Bread from Allrecipes.com, one of my favorite sources for recipes. From the get-go this recipe makes three loaves of bread, and with a rating of 4 1/2 stars and almost 300 reviews I knew this was the one to try.
I find that making bread in large quantities can be intimidating and it seems like it takes forever because it has to rise twice but, as I remembered today, for me kneading bread is amazingly therapeutic and two year olds love to play with dough. And of course it is always wonderful to smell bread in the oven baking.
In the end these loaves of bread turned out really nicely. I substituted 3 cups of whole wheat flour for the white flour to make the recipe healthier (next time I will try doing 4 cups) and I also omitted the butter at the very end. I sliced all three loaves when they cooled off and I am freezing two of them. The plan is to just take a slice from the freezer as needed and toast it. I will follow-up with this entry and let you know how well the bread freezes. And now I need to go freeze the remaining slices of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread to the birds.
In the end these loaves of bread turned out really nicely. I substituted 3 cups of whole wheat flour for the white flour to make the recipe healthier (next time I will try doing 4 cups) and I also omitted the butter at the very end. I sliced all three loaves when they cooled off and I am freezing two of them. The plan is to just take a slice from the freezer as needed and toast it. I will follow-up with this entry and let you know how well the bread freezes. And now I need to go freeze the remaining slices of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread to the birds.
Jes, how are you planning to freeze the individual slices? Are you going to pre-slice and then freeze it as a whole loaf, or individual saran-wrap each slice?
ReplyDeleteI sliced them and then froze the entire loaf. I thought about pre-freezing each slice but it was getting late and I had to go to bed. I will let you know how this method works out. Thanks for commenting!
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