Orange Nutbread
My nutbread has become something of a hit in the last couple of months:
I made one loaf for a party and 2/3 of it was eaten; and I made two loaves
for a parish lunch and about 3/4 of it was eaten. (And no, I don't add
henbane to my nutbread. I don't want any social gatherings to turn into
singing caves!)
Below is the recipe I used.
- 1 medium orange
- 1 cup raisins
- 2 tablespoons melted butter
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 beaten egg
- 2 cups flour
- 1/5 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup nuts
Squeeze juice from orange into 8 oz measuring cup; add boiling water to fill.
Blend orange rind in food processor with raisins. Add orange juice. Stir in
shortening, vanilla and egg. Add dry ingredients and beat well. Stir in
nuts.
Bake in wax-paper lined loaf pan at 350 degrees for an hour.
Other nutbread recipes can be found here.
For those of you novices who have absolutely no baking experience, here are
the notes I kept for the above recipe. I had no baking experience before I
made the nutbread either, and they have proven valuable to me:
- Those little mandarins you find available only around Christmas time
won't cut it; they're too small for this recipe, and the peel would be too
thin to manipulate properly anyway.
- Leave the peel on to juice the orange.
- The water can be boiled in a kettle.
- Grease the inside of the loaf pan itself (walls and all) with butter,
using a paper towel. Then line the pan with wax paper and grease it
with butter. This will make the loaf easier to remove from the pan later on.
- The post-juice contents of the orange can be scraped out with a grapefruit
spoon, but don't be too hard on the peel in the process. This isn't a
pumpkin!
- We need only the zest of the orange (the orange part of the peel). Peel
it off with a knife, taking care to peel off as little of the "white stuff"
as possible. (The zest could be grated, but a knife is easier to clean.)
Alternately, you can scrape away the white stuff, leaving the zest.
- Use the pulse mode on the food processor after you've added the
juice/water
mixture.
- If you haven't had experience cracking eggs before, make sure the egg is
well-cracked before you try to open it up!
- When measuring the baking powder and baking soda, use the wall of the box
or the flat lip of the mouth of the container to level off the amounts.
- If you're using a Moulinex food processor, here's one thing to keep in
mind. Once you have all your ingredients blended together, there may be
enough
of the mixture to overflow down into the center of the food processor bowl
when the blade is removed. I get around this problem by leaving the blade in
the bowl while pouring the mixture into the bread pan.
- Use a rubber scraper to get all of your mixture out into the pan.
- A good guide to determining whether your nutbread is baked or not is to
poke a toothpick into the top. If it comes out clean, it's baked.
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