A Delicious Experiment!

My class did a berry tasting last week. We turned it into snack and they got to choose which berries they wanted to mix with their yogurt. As it turned out there was a giant bowl of cut up strawberries and blueberries that was left over. I don't know about you but I hate throwing perfectly good fruit away. So I put it into a bag a brought it home.

When the weekend rolled around I knew I had to make something with it before it went bad. But I had no idea what I wanted to make. Then I remembered a strawberry bread that a friend of mine had made and figured it would be fun to make a bread. I turned to my friend Google and started searching for a recipe. After not that long I came across this recipe for strawberry nut bread.

I got started. I already knew that I wanted to change the recipe slightly by using whole wheat flour instead of bleached flour, I was planning on omitting the nuts and using a mix of the strawberries and blueberries. I started collecting the ingredients and got to the cinnamon. I looked all over the kitchen with no luck. Then I remembered my husband had made a cheesecake recently and asked where the cinnamon was. That is when he told me it was gone. Cinnamon is not really something you can replace with a similar taste so I thought I wasn't going to make this after all. But I remembered I had this...

I dumped some into my small food processor and pulsed until it was basically a cinnamon flavored wheat flour. I got about a 1/2 cup from what I processed. I filled the remainder of the cup with oats. So I eliminated a cup of flour. I also cut the sugar down to only one cup. I also thought the 1 1/4 cup of vegetable oil was alot. If I had bananas I think I would have tried to substitute with them but I was all out. As it turns out I had chocolate flavored olive oil that my cousin had given me for Christmas so I used 1/4 cup of that and 3/4 vegetable oil (I cut out 1/4 oil as well). I mixed everything together except the fruit and the batter was a little thick. I added a 1/4 of water to thin it out a little. I folded in the fruit and it seemed to be working.

I like to be able to give things away as gifts so I decided to put this into small loaf pans. It made four small loaves. I spooned the batter and in and they were ready for the oven.

I just hoped this little experiment of mine worked out.

After about 50-60 minutes they seemed to be done. I pulled them out of the oven and let them cool.

I could not wait to taste them. So I sliced it up and hoped for the best!

It was fantastic! I even got my husband to try it and he was just as surprised as I was at how good it turned out. I have since tried it for breakfast adding a little bit of chocolate peanut butter to it and it is just as delicious! If you want to give it a try I have included my adjusted recipe but you can always what kind of experiment you can come up with!

Strawberry Blueberry Bread:
2 Cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup processed cinnamon harvest Kashi cereal
1/2 cup oats
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup sugar
2 cups sliced strawberries and whole blueberries
4 eggs
1 cup oil
1/4 cup water

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease 4 4x2.5 inch loaf pans.
2. Sift together the flour, cereal, oats, baking soda, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the center. Beat together the eggs and oil and pour them into the well. Stir just enough to moisten the ingredients. If batter is thick slowly add in up to 1/4 cup of water. Fold in the strawberries and blueberries. Pour mixture into prepared pans; fill containers no more than half full.
3. Bake in a preheated oven about 60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool 20 to 30 minutes before removing from pans. Move to a rack to cool completely before slicing.