After baking a lot of tried and true favorites this week, I wanted to slip in something new and decided to try a recipe for Marmalade Nut Bread. This is from one of my favorite little booklets, Julia Waldbaum Has a Recipe for Holiday Cooking.
Julia Waldbaum’s recipe is supposed to be divided into two 9×5 inch pans. That was fine by me, but I noticed most other marmalade bread recipes with this amount of ingredients were baked in one. I baked it in two anyway and got stubby, short, cute little loaves. I wonder if Julia really used 9×5 inch loaf pans or something more like 6×3 and someone just threw in standard loaf pan size. I’m not sure, but the small loaf was fine and fit nicely into a cellophane bag.
Another good thing about this bread (aside from the great orange flavor) was it used a little less sugar and far less fat than some of the other recipes I perused. The texture was perfectly moist and not at all rubbery and I think this would be very good for breakfast with or without extra butter.
By the way, for the orange juice I used one of my new favorite products, Trop 50. It’s a lower sugar orange juice made without any artificial sweeteners. I’m not much of an orange juice drinker because I like getting my calories directly from the fruit, but if you like juice or buy it for the kids, I highly recommend this one (which I bought by accident).
Okay, back to the recipe. Here it is.
- 2 1/2 cups (11.8 oz) all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup walnuts, toasted and chopped
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup orange marmalade
- 1 cup orange juice
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 8×4 or two 9×5 inch loaf pan. For a larger loaf, just use one 9×5 inch loaf pan.
- In a large bowl, thoroughly mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the toasted walnuts and stir well.
- In a second bowl, mix together the egg, marmalade, orange juice and oil. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until mixed.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake on center rack for 50 minutes to 1 hour. My small loaves took 50 minutes, so I imagine one large would take 1 hour.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
And could you use sugar free orange marmalade or simply fruit (if there is such a thing) and lower the sugar further?
I was looking for a good marmalade bread a month or so ago and didn’t find one! This looks perfect! I like the short, stubby loaf–it seems like a perfect ‘tea’ bread to have with cream cheese or butter, so perhaps the appearance was intentional.
And I just saw in my pantry the other day a jar of orange marmalade that I don’t know why I bought and wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Sounds like a great bread to make minis for some neighbor Christmas gifts!