Monday, June 14, 2010

Citrus Streusel Bread, anyone?

Saturdays I have completely to myself while Steve is at work. This might sound nice in theory but around 3pm, I get really bored. Laundry is usually done, apartment is tidy, and...I have nothing else to do. This is also the hour of bad TV shows on Saturdays and I can only read for so long. I decided this week to make a citrus streusel quick bread. I love citrus and who doesn't love bread? The bread seemed simple enough to make but I needed a couple of ingredients. I finish writing our menu for the next 2 weeks, wrote up a grocery list and headed to Fareway. Side note, I love Fareway. It's a very peaceful grocery store to go to even when it's busy. I can always find what I'm looking for, unlike HyVee where I spend hours searching for something only to give up and leave. Fareway also has reasonable prices even though it didn't stop me from spending nearly $140...we had a lot of restocking to do. But back to the bread. After putting away all of the groceries, I started making the bread. The recipe called for a lemon or orange cake mix; I used lemon since I had it on hand. The best part of the bread was the topping on the bread. The topping was a mix of cake mix, brown sugar and cinnamon with butter cut into it. The recipe also called for pecans but since I don't like the texture of nuts in baked goods, I omitted the pecans. With the topping made and set aside, the rest of the batter came together quite nicely. I tried stirring the batter by hand but it looked a little gluey. Time to bust out the hand mixer! The mixer made all the difference. The batter was still thick but smooth. I spooned the batter into the bread loaf pans and sprinkled on the topping.

Soon my apartment smelled of lemon...it was divine. The loaves cooled in their pans for 10 minutes. My friend Kim came over right after I took the loaves out of the pans. The bread was fantastic. In hindsight, I would double the topping because it's the best part.

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