Sunshine Bread – introduction to vegan baking

Again it has been a while yet again but we have a number of things to put on here.  A general apology for the look of the blog changing.  It looks revolting and trying to work through it at the moment. I still am yet to put on ‘Last meal before I die’ and some cheap deserts that I love making.

Recently a friend who lives on the NSW south coast was inspired to start baking bread after watching the River Cottage series on TV.  That is a completely different story though about the strawberry finale special!  That sounds lovely you might think except she has nine children to feed from about 2 to 19, a home business plus driving long distances to places.  She posted a few pics on Facebook of her sour dough started with rhubarb in it and the finished product looked amazing.  So if she can bake bread then why has it taken me so long….. well I haven’t gone the whole hog so to speak but I have started to dip my toe in the water into the world of vegan baking.  I am not a vegan as I like a bit of both worlds but as someone who thoroughly enjoys a bit of baking I have enormous respect for them coming up with all of these delicious treats using vegetable fats, applesauce, vinegars etc.

Well a recipe caught my eye in a library book that I thought I must try from ‘The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes’ by Kris Holechek.  I recommend this book if you are looking into vegan baking or just alternative baking book.  The recipe is called the ‘You Are My Sunshine Loaf’ and it is a sunshiny loaf with the goodness of carrots, apple, oranges, nuts…. and scream ‘It Summer!” at you. Here it is, and, it is a bit of a cross between a bread and a cake but really delicious.  This loaf would be particularly good as a bread for breakfast or morning tea.  Enjoy it….. as I am.

You Are My Sunshine Loaf

2 1/4 cups plain flour
½ cup sugar
2 tea­spoons bak­ing pow­der
¼ tea­spoon salt
1 cup grated car­rots
1 medium apple, grated
1– 1/4 cups grain or nut milk
¼ cup oil
zest of 1 medium orange
juice of one medium orange
½ cup raisins
½ cup pecans

Pre­heat the oven to 180C degrees. Lightly grease a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan with mar­garine or oil.

In a medium bowl, com­bine flour, sugar, bak­ing pow­der and salt. In a large bowl, com­bine car­rots, apple and milk and mix until well-combined. Add oil, orange zest and orange juice. Add dry ingre­di­ents to wet ingre­di­ents in two batches until just com­bined. Gen­tly mix in raisins and pecans.

Spread bat­ter in the loaf pan and bake for 60 to 65 min­utes, until bread is golden and a tooth­pick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a cool­ing rack until the pan is cool enough to touch, about 40 min­utes. Run a knife around the out­side of the loaf to sep­a­rate it from the pan, and turn bread out of the pan to fin­ish cool­ing on a rack.

If mak­ing muffins, bake in greased or lined muf­fin tins for 22–25 min­utes. Fol­low cool­ing instruc­tions for loaf.

Store left­over bread (or muffins) cov­ered at room temperature.

Yield: 1 loaf, 10 slices or 12 reg­u­lar sized muffins

*this recipe is slightly amended from the ver­sion in “The 100 Best Vegan Bak­ing Recipes”. Please see this link for the original recipe http://nomnomnomblog.com/2010/01/05/muffins-on-the-boob-tube/