Cranberry Apple Bread
One DOES simply bake a successful cranberry apple bread on the first try... AND walk through Mordor.
Ingredients
- granny smith apples - 4 large
- cranberries - 2 cups
- flour - 3 cups
- brown sugar - 1.5 cups
- unsalted butter - 4 tbsp
- eggs - 2 large
- baking powder - 1 tbsp
- cinnamon - 3 tsp
- kosher salt - 1 dash
- vanilla extract - 1 large splash
- salted butter - 1 smidge
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Grease bundt pan with salted butter.
- Melt unsalted butter and set aside.
- Inspect cranberries for loose stems and discard, then wash and drain.
- Peel and chop apples. (If you don't have a good apple peeler, I highly recommend you get one.)
- Grab two large bowls.
- Put all fruit in one bowl.
- Put all dry ingredients in other.
- Beat eggs -- like Faramir's men beat Gollum -- in separate bowl and add to fruit.
- Mix melted butter and vanilla in with eggs and fruit... kind of like when Saruman mixed orcs and goblins to create Uruk-hai.
- Think about whether Uruk-hai is the plural of Uruk-hai? Perhaps you can have a gaggle of Uruk-hai? A school of Uruk-hai?
- Mix dry ingredients while attempting to break up the brown sugar.
- Pour fruit bowl into dry bowl and mix until there's no loose powder.
- Question whether the mixture will stay together as well as the Fellowship of the Ring. (SPOILER: It will exceed the togetherness of the fellowship!)
- Pour mixture into the greased bundt pan.
- Bake for one hour.
- Stick a skinny wooden chopstick in and see if it comes out clean.
- If it doesn't, then stick it back in the oven for another five minutes (like I did).
- If it does, let *MY PRECIOUS* sit for 15-30 minutes before flipping onto a cutting board.
- Breach the loaf like a sprinting Uruk-hai breaching the Deeping Wall of Helm's Deep! Or just slice it with a knife.
Why is this “The One Ring Edition”? The answer is two-fold:
- It’s made in a bundt pan.
- I just finished watching the all the extended editions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time.
A few afterthoughts… first, when I mixed this together, I thought that there was no way in heck it would come out of the bundt pan in one piece and bread-like. Shockingly enough, it came out perfect. Second, I tend to go heavy on the fruit. It was perfect for me, but you could conceivably go down to three apples and one cup of cranberries. Lastly, you may want to consider using a slightly less tart apple like a pink lady or some such. The cranberries are tart enough that a milder apple probably would have worked fine.
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