Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Apple fritter bread

I love the Archer Farms Apple Fritter Bread, but can't find it at my local Target anymore. For that reason I've been looking for a recipe to make my own. This is what I came up with. It is a mash up of a couple different recipes, and my family seems to like it a lot.
If you decide to make this bread, be advised that the dough is very soft and not really good for kneading by hand. I just mix it in a bowl and pour it into the mold when I am ready.

Ingredients (makes one loaf):

Dough:
3/4 c milk
1/4 c butter
2 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 tbsp yeast
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c water
1 egg

Filling:
2 apples, peeled and cut into small pieces
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 c sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp cinnamon

Make the dough first. In a large plastic container, heat the milk in the microwave for one minute, add the butter and heat another 30 seconds. The butter should melt into the milk, but the milk should not boil. After the butter is melted, add the rest of the dough ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon until all the ingredients are well mixed together. Let it rise in a warm place for one hour.

Make the filling: mix all the ingredients in a frying pan and cook until the apples begin to soften (3-4 min). Let it cool.

After the dough rises, it is ready to assemble. Grease a loaf pan and alternate layers of dough and layers of filling. The dough will be soft enough to be poured from the container into the loaf pan, and the layers will mix together a bit.



Let it rise in a warm place for one hour.

Bake at 350 for 50 minutes. Let it cool before taking it out of the pan.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

A little table runner from scraps

I had a bit of time to myself on Friday and used it to finish this table runner. I had the blocks sitting around for more than a year, since I pieced the train quilt. These were my practice blocks when I first tried the pattern. All little scraps from the scrap pile in blues and yellows. It finally occured to me to put them together and make a table runner.


I added a simple blue backing fabric and did a binding from strips of denim that I had leftover. I quilted it myself and couldn't be happier with the result. I know that the seams are perfectly straight, and that it has many mistakes, but I love the way it turned out, and that makes it special to me.