Cinnamon Bread With Raisins

Cinnamon is mixed in with the dough rather than sprinkled on top, giving the bread a beautiful light-brown hue.

(ETA: Due to gentle prodding through the comments and via email I will be adding the recipe in the next day or two. I need some time to figure out my scribble notes and write it into the post. Only one major factor that might be hindering this is my internet connection at home. It seems to have caught a cold and is acting very loopy; repairmen repairpeople have been alerted but are not scheduled to arrive until Mon. *sigh*)

I'm becoming quite good at starting baking projects at the most inappropriate times, I'm not sure why I can't get my act together lately (BAH! Who am I kidding, I cant get my act together period) but it seems like every time I start a baking project it has to be put on hold so that I can go take care of something else or we have to go out. I've been so inspired and so excited about this Vietnamese cinnamon that I spent all week planning a big Sunday baking extravaganza, which was for naught since we had plans. I really wanted to try making brioche again, enough time has passed since my first attempt that I felt another try would be fun. (Can you believe that was almost two years ago, so much in my life has changed since then; both my beloved little cats are gone, we bought a house, I had a baby, I passed two kidney stones in an excruciating but spectacular display of emergency room drama and I've learned so much about who I really am) Ack! I’m getting off topic Anyway—I had been hankering to make a cinnamon raisin brioche with the Vietnamese cinnamon that was recently purchased and that I subsequently fell in love with but I was forced to scrap that idea after the hubby reminded me that we had a one year old’s birthday party to attend Sunday. bleh!

In the split second of time that passed between when Tom reminded me about the party and the baby went insane and became a needy, clinging, crying crank-toddler (a new stage in her development please kill me) I reached over and pulled out my treasured copy of James Beard's classic "Beard on Bread". This was my first ever eBAY book purchase and it came to me from a very lovely woman in California who had become widowed and was going to be moving in with her son. Some of the things she was parting with, like her cookbooks, meant a lot to her and so I had to assure her via email that the book would be coming to a loving home where people liked to cook and that a place of honor had already been reserved on our bookshelf. She seemed to like that idea. (Don’t people who tell you their life stories in the first five minutes of meeting you whether its on the bus, or train, or, in an "you are the winning bidder" email just fascinate you...me too! Two weeks later my package arrived and inside was an almost mint first edition copy of Beard's book. What really made the book so special, what endeared it to me forever was that she included some of her favorite clippings; various recipes for breads and pies from around the world. The majority of the recipes came from the LA Times and McCall’s magazines from 1973 till about 1979. It may seem like such an insignificant thing to some people but for me those clippings represent an intimate look into someone’s life in the kitchen. I think the modern day equivalent of that is what I've tried to set up here on the web by keeping this blog, but I digress.

So Sunday morning, five hours before the party, chaos had broken out in our little kitchen. My husband was on the brink of being angry with me, the baby was running around in just a diaper and socks with no intentions of getting dressed AT ALL and I was frantically buzzing around in my kitchen (<----hey, that’s a great title for a blog!) trying to make cinnamon bread. There was way too much going on and with all the crying and tension in the air I was having trouble concentrating and so I goofed up the recipe.

Beard has a recipe in the book called "Cinnamon Bread", a lovely little recipe that incorporates the cinnamon directly into the dough, an idea I really liked and with the addition of raisins (the husband bought a huge box of them and so now we are more than set for raisins, probably for life even) Anyway, I liked Beards recipe and started making it, but at some point during all the crying and throwing herself on the floor that the baby was doing I lost the page and when I found it again it had somehow morphed into a recipe called "Mother's Raisin Bread" arghhh. I had to stop what I was doing and compare recipes to see how bad I messed up and after 20 minutes and 100 or so read-throughs I decided to throw caution to the wind and wing it. I really liked the results I got even though I can't remember what I did. The bread was so fragrant, the cinnamon made our kitchen smell so good you just wanted to lie down and hug the floor, or maybe even lick the walls. The bread was delicious, with a capital D, sweet but not too sweet, yeasty but mellow and the raisins were good, very complimentary to the cinnamon actually. I apologize for not providing a recipe this time, but in trying to remember what it was that I did I realize I have forgotten quite a bit if it since Sunday. I do not want to provide a recipe that I know has the potential of failing, so I won’t this one time. I will be making cinnamon raisin bread again, Tom and Ellie have shown great appreciation for this as a breakfast item and a snack spread with cream cheese, or, as French toast, and when I do get another chance to make a second batch I'll post the recipe here. I promise.

Written by Deb on March 23, 2005 02:23 AM