Parfait! Spiced Strawberry Bread

Wow!

I cannot believe it’s been over three years since I last posted this truly fine fruit bread. In truth, I think that I had simply been making it so often that we kinda got tired of it, so the whole idea of strawberry bread went to a dark corner of my files.

Where it would have stayed… had I not gotten this great deal on strawberries – and there’s just so much spinach salad (no matter how good) a couple of guys can eat!

The bread is just as good as we recalled it being – mebbe even a touch better, since I’ve tweaked the spices by adding a bit of ground clove along with the cinnamon, and replaced plain pecans with honey roasted nuts lightly ground in the food processor.

The slightly grinding the nuts bit is, I think, key with this bread. While Rich loved it in the past, he thought it sometimes tasted a bit ‘oily’ – and with this batch, he hasn’t noticed it a bit.

By the way: this recipe makes two nicely sized loaves of bread, or, as I chose to this time, one loaf and one nicely articulated bundt pan; so plan to have folk over to marvel at your bread making skills, give one loaf away, or stash one in the freezer for a rainy day.

INGREDIENTS
Pan Coating:
•2 tbsp solid shortening
•2 tbsp vegetable oil
•2 tbsp flour

Bread:
•2 cups fresh strawberries
•3-1/8 cups flour
•2 cups white sugar
•2 tsp ground cinnamon
•1 tsp ground cloves
•1 tsp salt
•1 tsp baking soda
•1-1/4 cup vegetable oil
•4 eggs, beaten
•1-1/4 cup chopped honey roasted nuts – or use plain pecans or walnuts, just do grind them up a bit.

First things first; make the pan coating by combining the shortening, vegetable oil, and flour together with a fork in a small bowl, then brush evenly over the inside of two 9×5 inch bread pans or, as I did, one bread pan and one articulated bundt pan. Forget about using cooking spray; with this treatment, once baked, your bread will pop out of both pans with ease and whole.

Heat oven to 350º.

Slice the strawberries, place in a medium bowl, and sprinkle with a bit of the sugar.

Combine the flour, remaining sugar, cinnamon, clove, salt, and baking soda in a large mixing bowl and blend well. I used my stand mixer with the regular paddle.

Beat the eggs well with the veggie oil – I used my immersion blender – then stir in the strawberries.

Add the strawberry, egg and oil mixture to the flour mixture and stir (or mix on low) until the dry ingredients are just moistened – there may be a few dry spots, don’t worry about it.

Stir in the nuts, then divide the batter between the two pans.

Note: the bread pan and the articulated bundt pan both have close to the same capacity (I measured) so a fifty-fifty split will work fine here.

Bake both for 50 to 60 minutes – or until a wooden pick or skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Let both pans cool on a rack for ten minutes before turning out the bread and cooling completely on a rack.

Tasty – I like mine with a schmear of chive or jalapeño cream cheese.

And now I have a spare loaf in the freezer for emergencies…