Again With the Blueberries

Not really a recipe here.  More of a suggestion.  A thought.  A "here's what I did, maybe you'd like to try it, too" kind of thing.

I was making bread - a large batch of 6 loaves.  I'd planned to make 4 regular bread for sandwiches and so forth, and two loaves of raisin bread.

So I made enough dough for all the loaves, then divided it into two bowls - 1/3 into one bowl for the raisin breads, 2/3 into the other bowl for the sandwich bread.

I rolled and formed the raisin bread first, and then I was thinking...hmmm...we have 800 tons of blueberries...wonder how blueberry raisin bread would be?

So took one quarter of the sandwich bread batch and did this:

I pressed it out into a pretty bad-looking rectangle, brushed the surface with melted butter, and sprinkled it with a cinnamon sugar blend and about half a cup or so of blueberries.

I don't have exact proportions for making the cinnamon sugar.  I just put a bunch of sugar in a bowl and added a dose of cinnamon and mixed it together.  It looked good and smelled good and tasted good, and that worked for me, so just do whatever works for you.  If I had to guess.....I'd say maybe half a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon for the proportion.  Something like that.  I didn't use ALL of that on this loaf, either.  I'd  made up a whole bunch of it weeks ago and had it on hand for loaves of raisin bread or to sprinkle on buttered toast.

Anyway, here's what that all looked like:

Nice rectangle, Jayne.  Love those straight edges!  And the amazingly precise 90 degree angles on those corners!  How DO you do it????

Then I rolled it up from one long end to the other, jelly-roll style, and rolled that long thing into a sad, lumpy spiral, like so:

My!  How stylish!  It would make a lovely hat!

And then I dropped that into a greased 6" springform pan and let it rise with the other loaves until it was time to bake.

It's even prettier now that it was dumped in that pan!  Looks like an anemic snake with stomach cramps. 

When the other loaves of bread looked ready to bake, I figured this one was, too, so I put them all in the oven together (375 degrees F) and baked til they were done - about 40 minutes, I think. 

After they came out of the oven, I brushed the tops of the loaves with butter and left them, still in the pans and covered with dish towels, for half an hour, to soften the top crust.  Then I took them out of the pans and let them finish cooling.

The blueberry loaf is looking better, now that it has some height and color.  Still, it's not my prettiest effort.

But looks aren't everything, of course.

It's what's inside that counts.

And look!  Purple craters!

Yes, I know, I would have been better off in some ways making this with dried blueberries instead of fresh.  I knew that when I made the bread.  But I didn't actually care.  I just wanted to see how it would come out.

And this is how.

So it  looked kind of bizarre...but it tasted very good, especially toasted, with plenty of butter.

And when you're hungry, that's all that matters.

Right?

Comments

[erin fudge]

Wow! My mouth is watering just looking at the blueberry bread (and I just finished eating some homemade banana bread!). Question, what's your recipe for sandwich bread? I've just recently started making bread and have wanted to try doing that. Thanks and many blessings!

[Emily]

Did I see a container of blueberries? As in a container of purchased blueberries???? tsk tsk tsk ;)

[Jayne]

No!! The container was from blueberries purchased before yours (or the wild's) berries were ripe, andI'd saved it because I'm running out of small plastic containers. Then whenI picked yours,I measured them out into one or two cup portions and stored thosein whatever containers I could find. Including that one. I wouldn't DARE buy blueberries at a storeif I didn't absolutely have to!! Perish the thought!

[Jayne]

I've got a few bread recipes I use for sandwich bread - all of these pass my husband's "Is it Soft?" test. They're all on the Bread page in my "Glorious Food" section - here's the link - http://www.barefootkitchenwitch.com/the_barefoot_kitchen_witc/recipes.html
The ones I'm talking about are the Indiana Basic White Bread, the Potato Bread, the Savory Sweet Potato Bread, and the Soft White Bread. Any of these would work for both sandwiches and for the Blueberry Bread.
If you do try any of these, I'd love to hear how the bread turns out for you!

[Mimi]

Yum! Blueberry bread!

[Jen]

Oh wow Ive not seen blueberry bread makde like that before. This looks SOOO good! Will have to give a try sometime :)