Fruit and Nut Loaf

Source

“Low-Fat Vegetarian Cooking” by Jenny Stacey with small modifications

Taste 4 (out of 5)

Difficulty 3 (out of 5)

Ingredients

- 225 g/ 8 oz white bread flour

- 2.5 g/ 1/2 tsp salt

- 15 g/ 1 tbsp polyunsaturated margarine

- 15 g/ 1 tbsp caster sugar

- 75 g/ 3 oz raisins

- 25 g/ 1 oz walnuts, chopped

- 10 g/ 2 tsp active dry yeast

- 150 ml low fat milk

- 15 ml/ 1 tbsp honey

Total 12 servings, 139 cal/ serving

Instructions

1. Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl. Rub the margarine, then stir in the sugar, raisins, walnuts and yeast.

2. Place the milk in a pan and heat gently until lukewarm, but do not boil. Add the lukewarm milk to dry ingredients and bring the mixture together to form a dough.

3. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 5-7 minutes until smooth and elastic. Shape the dough into a round, cover and let proof in a warm place for about an hour or until doubled in size.

4. Preheat the oven with the baking stone on the middle rack (if available) to 425F/ 220C.

5. Cut 3 parallel slashes on top of the bread, rotate the bread 90 degrees and make 3 more slashes to form a grid. Bake the bread for 35 minutes, until nice a brown.

6. Place on a wire rack and brush with honey. Cool and serve.

Afterthoughts

- Good sweet bread with semi soft crust. Not quite a cake, but could be one if you add more sugar. Seems like a perfect breakfast loaf with jam and butter.

- There seem to be too many raisins, they kept falling out of the dough as I was kneading it. Maybe the raisins I had were too hard. I might try soaking them in water for about an hour before adding them to the dough - maybe they will be more elastic and stickier. Also the raisins on top of the dough turned out too dry. Hopefully soaking will resolve that too. Or I should just be using a very wet and soft type of raisins.