Monday, November 8, 2010

Emptying the Bag

It's a toss up for me as to how I feel about the holiday food scene. I mean, though I despise pumpkin pie and think mincemeat is something best buried deep underground, I make several versions of both, and given their reception by both family and the foodie community I would say they're recipes worth keeping around for a while. Even though my grandma's famous mashed potatoes with their lashings of cream cheese and butter are off the menu for me now, I still adore mashers with the simple additions of salt, pepper and garlic. Oddly enough, I reserve my cranberry sauce use for mixing into those potatoes when they're day-old, and when I was a meat-eater it paired with cold turkey, Miracle Whip and whole-grain toast. It's not overly gourmet, but I love the way the cranberries pair with the other, drier ingredients, and my lower-sugar, stevia-sweetened sauce that I made last year is still one of my favourites.

But not everyone adores cranberry sauce as much as I do - except possibly my mom, who uses it almost as much as me! So every year we make a half-batch, which then leads to the random half-bags of the fruit sitting in the freezer. Of course something like that can't stay stashed for long around here... not with my "boredom baking" tendency! I had bought some organic almond butter and whole almonds a while ago for what I think was a batch of cookies, and I had seen a recipe somewhere for an almond and poppyseed cake. So what better than an almond-cranberry-poppyseed loaf?

So I chopped up those tart little morsels and chucked them into a decadent quickbread batter, topping the raw mix with some of the whole almonds just to be pretty. Because who doesn't want some pretty, glittering gems in their day?


Almond - Poppyseed Loaf with Cranberries
Serves 10
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tbsp poppy seeds
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tbsp baking powder
1 cup 1% milk
1/4 cup melted butter
2 tbsp almond butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
1/3 cup slivered almonds
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries, roughly chopped

  1. Preheat oven to 350F, grease a loaf pan.
  2. In a bowl, whisk flours, sugar, poppy seeds, nutmeg and baking powder. Set aside.
  3. In a large bowl, beat milk, butter, almond butter, egg, vanilla and almond extract.
  4. Add flour mixture and stir just to combine.
  5. Fold in almonds and cranberries.
  6. Bake 1 hour 10 minutes.
  7. Cool in pan 30 minutes, then turn out and cool on a wire rack
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 268.2
Total Fat: 10.4 g
Cholesterol: 34.7 mg
Sodium: 51.7 mg
Total Carbs: 38.0 g
Dietary Fiber: 3.2 g
Protein: 7.2 g

1 comment :

  1. Good plan. Last year we used our cranberry sauce leftovers to top pumpkin pancakes! Delicious.

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