Spiced Rhubarb Bread

July 22, 2017 Kathleen Henry

This lightly scented rhubarb bread is a wonderful alternative to rhubarb pie or crisp. It’s absolutely divine for breakfast with a cup of coffee, as a midday treat, or topped with vegan vanilla ice cream for a scrummy dessert. However you have it, this sweet and tart dessert bread is incredibly easy and sure to please even rhubarb snubbers. Made with olive oil and banana, it’s a little healthier than other recipes as well.

Spiced Rhubarb Bread - Produce On Parade - This lightly scented rhubarb bread is a wonderful alternative to rhubarb pie or crisp. It’s absolutely divine for breakfast with a cup of coffee, as a midday treat, or topped with vegan vanilla ice cream fo…

I really love rhubarb. I know it's not super popular with everyone. However, it's ubiquitous up here in Alaska; almost every house has a giant, lumbering rhubarb plant (or two, or three) loitering outside like sentinels. In the spring, our local paper ran an a story about the blushing stalks; that even though many houses have rhubarb plants, most are inherited when the house was bought. That rhubarb, nowadays, is on the out! It's tart, it's banal, and it's just not that tasty.

To me, that's blasphemous. I adore rhubarb. I love how hardy and stubborn it is; how it'll grow anywhere and be the first plant the shine it's smiling face, welcoming in spring. I love it's giant leaves and remembering my Grandma Nancy showing me how to wear one as a hat when I was a little girl. I love it's sour and pungent aroma, and how it's flavor it makes my lips pucker with delight. I love that it can be savory or sweet and how it's wonderful in pretty much everything from muffins to stewed, on top of ice cream. It's versatile and resilient. Just like Alaskans.

I am lucky enough to have a unique Russian variety, whose leaves are shaped slightly different than the common variety. This makes me feel especially domestic, in a homesteady type of way. It's silly and frivolous, but it makes me happy in a small and odd way.

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Spiced Rhubarb Bread

By Kathleen Henry @ Produce On Parade

Published 07/03/2017

Ingredients

1 cup unsweetened, plain soymilk
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ cup brown sugar, divided
⅔ cup olive oil
1 medium very ripe banana
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp kosher salt
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp chai spice or pumpkin pie spice
2 cups rhubarb, chopped small
1 tbsp vegan butter
½ tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325°F and coat two 9x5 inch loaf pans with a nonstick cooking spray. Set aside.
In a liquid measuring cup, whisk together the soymilk, lemon juice, and vanilla extract; let sit for 5 minutes.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together 1 cup of brown sugar, olive oil, and the banana until very smooth. Whisk in the soymilk mixture.
In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking soda, and chai spice. Stir in the rhubarb until coated. Slowly stir the flour mixture into the wet mixture until just combined. Divide batter between both the loaf pans. (Can be made into 16 muffins, reduce baking time to about 25 minutes)
Melt the butter in a small bowl in the microwave, about 10 seconds. Stir in the remaining ¼ cup brown sugar and cinnamon. Drizzle/scoop the mixture evenly on the top of each loaf.
Bake for about 40 minutes, until slightly browned on top and springs back when gently poked. Allow to cool completely in the pan on a wire cooling rack before serving.

Yield: 2 loaves / 16 servings

Anouk loves rhubarb almost as much as Todd and I :)

Spiced Pumpkin Gingerbread

October 8, 2014 Kathleen Henry

This bread! Well, technically it's more like a gooey dessert loaf. Is that a category? This gooey dessert loaf...will make...your house...smell like heaven.

If I was a heaven-believing type of person (I'm not, with the grotesque exception of a doggy heaven), I know it would smell like this bread baking. It's like if Thanksgiving and Christmas were on the same day. That's what it smells like.

Like earthy pumpkin, zesty ginger, sweet molasses, and holiday spices. It's amazing what they can do aromatically when married together and heated.

Spiced Pumpkin Gingerbread — Produce On Parade - This gooey dessert bread is the essence of #Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. Heavenly winter #gingerbread is scented with autumnal spices and moistened with #pumpkin. Bits of candied ginger throug…

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

— Socrates

Socrates knows what's up.

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Spiced Pumpkin Gingerbread

by Katie @ Produce On Parade October-8-2014

This gooey dessert bread is the essence of Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. Heavenly winter gingerbread is scented with autumnal spices and moistened with pumpkin. Bits of candied ginger throughout lend a spicy bite. NOTES: Feel free to use 2 cups all-purpose flour if you like. Be sure to let the bread rest, for it will need to settle.

Ingredients

2 Tbsp. ground flax seed
1/4 cup cold water
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat white flour
½ tsp. kosher salt
2 tsp. baking soda
4 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
1 15 oz. can of canned pumpkin
1 Tbsp. olive oil
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup molasses
¼ cup candied ginger, minced

Instructions

In a small bowl, whisk together the ground flax and cold water. Allow to rest until ready to use.In a large bowl, whisk together the flours through and including the cardamom. In a medium bowl, combine the pumpkin through and including the molasses, as well as the flax mixture.Preheat the oven to 350 F. Now, gently stir the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined. Stir in the candied ginger. Do not over mix. Coat a bread pan with a nonstick cooking spray and pour in the batter. Bake at 350 F for 60 minutes or until set. Allow to rest in the pan on a cooling rack for 10 minutes then remove from pan and allow to cool another 10 minutes.

Details

Prep time: 30 mins Cook time: 1 hour Total time: 1 hour 30 mins Yield: 1 loaf of bread

Dutch Word of The Day

My bread is similar to a Dutch gingerbread called "peperkoek" (pay-per-cooik) or "pepper cake", except that peperkoek usually uses rye flour! Pretty cool huh?

Good Deed of The Day

This is one of the best articles I've read in a long time. Originally published in Cosmologics, the magazine of Science, Religion, and Culture program at the Harvard Divinity School. It's titled, Why Atheists Should be Vegans, and you need to read it.

Wholesome Chocolate Coffee Dessert Bread

March 28, 2014 Kathleen Henry

Bakery worthy recipe right here you guys! And pretty darn healthy too. It's my Chocolate Coffee Dessert Bread and it's my new obsession. I shall eat you (the bread) all up and when you are all gone, I will make another. I'm now the God of all vegan chocolate dessert breads. Whoa, ego check. That's rude. Here's how I became said God. We have so many leftovers you guys. So many. Todd and I aren't what I'd call massive eaters. Don't get me wrong, I freaking love food. Like, going to the grocery store is literally one of my favorite things to do. I. Love. Grocery. Shopping. There's no way you looove grocery shopping if you don't have delicious thoughts of food that continually preoccupy and intrude your mind on an hourly basis. I guess it makes up for my extreme aversion to every other possible type of shopping out there. Whether it's for clothes, home, beauty, or what have you. But especially the clothes. What I'm trying to say is that we just don't eat food in gargantuan amounts. What does this have to do with this dessert bread? I'm getting there.

Okay, loads of leftovers. In our house, that means it's obviously time for me to make something sweet! I wanted to make a bread (being easy was a requirement), but it had to be kind of dessert-like (obvs), it had to have chocolate (duh), annnd it had to be somewhat healthy (I know, I know). Finally, I settled on a chocolate coffee dessert bread. This bread was a total experiment and I knew that if it completely flopped, I'd have no post for today. I made peace with that and went on my merry way.

Why was this bread such an underdog (or All-Star depending on your viewpoint)? You'll find out. Firstly, no chicken eggs. Flax seed eggs are used instead. Vegan baking can be tricky, especially if you've learned to bake using non-vegan ingredients. I also used two parts all-purpose flour and one part whole wheat pastry flour, to add a bit of nutrition. Next time I make this, and there will be a next time very soon, I'll try it with only whole wheat pastry flour. No canola oil. People get all sketched out by using olive oil in baked goodies. I pretty much always use olive oil (or coconut oil) because canola oil is just straight-up dodgy, you know? I've never really had an issue baking with it, unless the dessert is very delicate with regards to flavor. Other tastes overpower any potentially offending note from the olive oil, in my experience.

But that's not all I did. Nope. The big undertaking was using almost entirely dates to sweeten this dessert bread! I'd read up about how 1 cup of dates can be blended with 1/2-1 cup water to make a date paste that can replace 1 cup of sugar. However, I'd never really tried it and honestly I had to really Google the shit out of it to find the ratio. Surprise, it's pretty much one to one. I use dates in my smoothies and the like, but I'd never flat out used it as a substitute for sugar when baking.

I wish I had discovered this earlier! Check out the graphic below on dates kicking sugar out of the park with a big, nutritious punch to the face! Dates have almost half the calories, cup for cup compared to sugar, 12 grams of fiber and a whole lotta potassium. So next time, try using dates instead of sugar in your baking!

Have you tried the Google food comparison thing? Just type in any two foods with "vs" in between them into the Google search bar. I discovered this on accident one day by typing in "yam vs sweet potato"...and now I'm addicted to. You should definitely go try it. Moving on, since there's already 1 cup non-dairy milk in this recipe, I decided I would blend the dates with that. I wasn't sure if the bread would be sweet enough, so I added 2 Tbsp. of vegan sugar just to be safe. My sweet tooth told me to do it. I was also a little scared that the bread wouldn't rise for one reason or another. Let's just say this bread was loads scary and there were many leaps of faith taken by yours truly.

But oh boy did my boldness pay off. This bread has the absolute perfect texture. It's dense but not brick-like. Fudgy but not goopy. Moist but not wet, and crumbly but not in excess. There's a rich, chocolate flavor that's balanced by the coffee and since this bread isn't exceptionally sweet, those deep flavors are really empowered.

Wholesome Chocolate Coffee Dessert Bread

Makes 1 loaf

Notes: This bread can be as sweet as you'd like, or not! Feel free to add 1/2 cup of chocolate chips to sweeten the deal, or additional sugar.

Prep:
1 Tbsp. ground flax seed
2 Tbsp. water
1 cup sweetened (or not) coconut or soy milk
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar
Blender:
1 1/2 cup pitted medjool dates, packed (about 17)
2-4 Tbsp. vegan sugar (optional)
1-2 packets of instant coffee granules (2-4 grams)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Dry:
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
End:
1/2 cup olive oil
small bit of powdered sugar

In a small bowl, mix together the ground flax seed and the water. Place in the fridge until ready to use.

In a pyrex measuring cup or bowl, whisk together the milk, lemon juice, and vinegar. Allow to rest until ready to use, at least 5 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 F and coat a loaf pan with a nonstick cooking spray.

Add the blender ingredients to a blender. Now add the flax mixture and the milk mixture. Blend on high, until the dates are pulverized into a smooth paste.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.

Stir the contents of the blender into the dry ingredients until almost mixed, then add the olive oil. Continue to stir until the batter is well combined.

Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake at 350 F for about 50 minutes, until set. When done, remove and allow to cool in the pan on a wire cooling rack for 10 minutes.

Then, transfer to a cutting board and dust with powdered sugar. I don't have a fancy sifter, so I just use my mesh strainer.

Cut into slices and serve. Store in an airtight container. This bread might taste even better the next day, in my opinion.

Produce On Parade - Wholesome Chocolate Coffee Dessert Bread Bob wasn't pleased that he didn't get any of the bread. No chocolate for dogs, Bobbeldore!