I love the idea of cinnamon bread, but it seems like all of the commercially produced versions have raisins in them. I am not a big raisin fan. This dates back to an incident in my childhood when I bit into what I thought was a chocolate chip cookie and was crushed to get I got a mouthful of raisins instead of chocolate. Beard’s cinnamon bread recipe doesn’t have any raisins in it, so I was excited to try it.
Here are the ingredients:
I didn’t realize until I was measuring it out that the tablespoon of cinnamon called for in the recipe is a considerable amount of cinnamon. You could smell it all the way on the second floor of our townhouse.
I added about 4 1/4 cups of flour to my dough, and then kneaded in an additional 1/4 cup of flour. After the first rising, this yielded enough dough for two 8 x 4 loaves.
The strong cinnamon aroma that wafted through the house as the bread baked was delicious. I baked the loaves at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, and then 350 degrees for 15 minutes. The top of one of the loaves was starting to get a bit over-browned when I pulled it from the oven.
Since I didn’t finish baking until 10:30 last night, I sampled the bread for breakfast. As expected, the cinnamon flavor was very pronounced, but the bread was not overly sweet–there was only 1/3 cup of sugar between the two loaves. It was delicious fresh, and it should make wonderful toast as well. And the best part? Not a raisin in sight!