Kids Cooking Thursday: Fruit Salad Bread

This week for Kids Cooking Thursday, we made something for breakfasts. Since the first thing I do of a morning is feed Master 2-Month-Old a bottle, I don't generally get time for a sit down breakfast. In fact, I usually don't even get to drink a coffee until he's finished, which can be up to an hour later. So if I want breakfast, I have to be able to grab it and eat it, in the time it takes for the kettle to boil, and then hot water to heat the bottle. (about 3 minutes all up) Hence the cupcake sized bread. That, and I only had one loaf pan.

This recipe lovingly stolen from Cookie Baker Lynn. You can check out her original recipe at that link, the recipe below reflects how we cooked it.

Fruit Salad Bread

4 cups all-purpose flour
1-3/4 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1-1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 eggs
1 Tbsp grated lemon zest
1-1/2 cups fruit juice (I used Apple & Mango with a Hint of Lemon Myrtle)
3 cups mixed chopped fruit* (We used 3/4 punnet strawberries, 3/4 of an apple, 1/2 a banana, and 225g dried apricots.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease 2- 9 x 5 inch loaf pans (or one, and put out 20 patty pan cases into muffin tins). Realise you have no baking paper, so you can't cut pieces of parchment paper to fit in the bottom and up the sides of the pans, or put the parchment paper in the pans and grease. Or you could read the recipe properly before committing to cook it, and buy paper, then you could actually do that step. I didn't.

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl; rub in butter with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal.

In a medium bowl, toss the fruit with 1/4 cup of the flour mixture.

Combine eggs and juice in a large mixing bowl. Add the flour mixture, stirring well. Gently fold in the fruit.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan, and the rest into the paper cases. Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. For cupcake/muffin sized, that's about 20 minutes. Cool in pans 10 minutes; remove the bread from pans, peel off the parchment paper, and let cool on wire racks. Leave the paper on if you have cupcake sized, it'll help keep them moist for longer.

* Note on fruit- If you're using leftover fruit that's very juicy, put it in a sieve to drain off the excess juice. You could use that juice, combined with confectioner's sugar to make a glaze for the warm bread.

Yield: 2 loaves

This was a little more detailed than most of our Thursday recipes, but the kids took it in their stride. Above you see Miss Two setting out the patty cases. Our mix was fairly stiff, it was more of a blob operation, than a case of pouring the batter. I really recommend the Native Blend juice we used, it gave a lovely lemony, limey, mango taste to the bread, and the most divine smell to the uncooked batter. The Apple, Strawberry and Rosella Flower flavour would have worked equally well I think. Perhaps we should make another batch to see. :)

This was an entry for August MBP: Fruit Fare, hosted by My Diverse Kitchen. Monthly Blog Patrol was dreamt up by Coffee @ The Spice Cafe.
***The Round-up is here***

Mixed Berry Smoothies

With a forecasted top of 40°C today, I was glad it was fish and chips for dinner, especially as yesterday I well and truly overdid it with the making of soup, rolls, ice cream and cake. But yesterday was only 38°C.

Not that I had fish though, and DP thought it was too hot to eat anything salty... in fact he must think it is still too hot to eat anything, even though the cool change has come in (now).

But at the time I finished dinner, it was still 38°C. And I thought it was the perfect time to try a Mixed Berry Smoothie, as blogged by Shyamala, over at Food, In The Main... This is a fairly old recipe of hers, so click here for the pertinent post, or click on my ever so arty pic above. Her recipe was as follows:

Mixed Berry Smoothie:
1-1/2 cups mixed berries (she used strawberries, raspberries and frozen blueberries)
3 scoops low-fat vanilla icecream
2 cups milk
1 cup yogurt
a few ice cubes
Sugar to taste

Method:
Blitz all the ingredients (minus the sugar) in a blender. Taste for sweetness and add sugar as required. Blend again. Serve cold in big glasses.

Now, I didn't change much, but I feel to be honest, I should share the changes I made. I used frozen blueberries and frozen raspberries. I had no strawberries, as it's impossible to keep them in my house with Miss Two around... she can sniff them out of fridge at 5 metres away, and then she won't stop pestering till she can eat them! I also had no low-fat vanilla ice cream. I have vanilla bean ice cream I made yesterday, but that is far too good to go in a smoothie, no matter how good the smoothie! But I did have some moderately low fat strawberry ice cream that I made back in January, that was a little on the undersweet side, so we haven't been eating it. I also used wildberry flavoured yogurt, because I couldn't find a big enough single plain or vanilla when I did the shopping. Oh yeah, I didn't use ice either, because all my fruit was frozen. And I used a couple of drizzles of honey instead of sugar to sweeten.

Still, it turned out this lovely bright purple colour, and once again I find myself lamenting the lack of a real digital camera, as opposed to the dodgy one on my phone, or the 7yo one we have with no connecting to computer abilities (anymore). You really can't tell the beautiful colour this was from these photos.

Wish you could see the real colour this was

This was an entry for March's Monthly Blog Patrol, hosted by Sig at Live To Eat and originally thought up by Coffee at The Spice Cafe