Cherry Pecan Yogurt Spice Bread

This recipe should really be called “I Meant to Make This, But Came Up With This Instead”. I really wanted to make a cinnamon bread after seeing Kevin’s recipe for it on Closet Cooking (this Canadian can cook!), but I didn’t have any buttermilk in my house. I did, however, have some Fage yogurt and a newfound love for cardamom, so I decided to improvise. The mixture of the nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom completely overtook my little apartment as my loaf baked, setting aside any doubts I made a colossal mistake…even though I hadn’t even had one bite yet.

Not only was I missing the all important buttermilk, I realized I had an overabundance of cherries and pecans from a granola I made a few weeks ago. Since I was already going out on a culinary limb, I figured why not add nuts and fruit to the mix? And while I loved the swirl of Kevin’s cinnamon bread, I didn’t feel like going through the extra steps required to achieve it. So basically, I took Kevin’s recipe, fucked it up and still came out with something good.

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 tablespoon cardamom

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon lemon zest

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 ounces Greek yogurt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a small bowl, combine the cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg and set aside. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in another bowl and place it near your stand mixer. In the stand mixer bowl, cream together the sugars (both the white and the brown) and the softened butter. Add the eggs, vanilla and lemon zest and continue to mix until a smooth, light brown batter is formed. In turns, add a third of the dry ingredients and then a third of the yogurt. Continuing doing this until all of the dry ingredients and yogurt have been added. Remove the mixing bowl from the stand mixer and using a spatula, fold in the nuts and the cherries. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake it in the oven for an hour. Insert a toothpick into the center of the loaf to make sure it’s done (it will come out clean if it is finished). As a side note, this bread has a kick of spice flavors. If you’re not a huge fan of spiced breads, I strongly suggest cutting back the measurements for the cardamom (or not making this at all).

I ate a slice of the bread along with the peppered maple bacon I blogged about earlier. It’s an easy thing to make, requiring only three ingredients:

Thick sliced bacon

Fresh ground pepper

Maple syrup

Since I was making the bacon along with the bread, the oven was set at 350 degrees. Because the maple forms a glaze, use a pan and not a baking sheet for this bacon. Ground pepper over each individual slice of bacon, flip it over and ground pepper on the opposite side. Dip a pastry brush into maple syrup and “paint” the bacon with the syrup. Flip the bacon over and paint the other side as well. I used only about a teaspoon of syrup for each slice of bacon (1/2 teaspoon for one side and a 1/2 teaspoon for the other side). Place the bacon in the oven to cook for six minutes per side (or until each side is crisp to the touch). Feel is important here because the maple glaze prematurely turns the bacon a deep amber color.

Since Summer is vastly approaching (read: I need to fit into my cute Summer dresses), this will be one of the last pork bacon recipes you will see here for a while. So enjoy!