Strawberry Bread

My favorite part of summer is eating fresh berries with a splash of cream. This bread can be served with vanilla ice cream for dessert, or could be sliced and used in place of plain bread for delicious french toast.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups sliced fresh strawberries (this is roughly approximate to 1 pint - a lot of times I throw in a few extras)
1 cup granulated white sugar, divided
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2/3 tsp Vietnamese Cassia cinnamon. If using "regular" cinnamon, use a full tsp.
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 stick of melted butter (not too hot! - just barely melted)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease and flour or use non-stick cooking spray inside a standard size loaf pan. Rinse, core and slice the strawberries. A bonus hint for the day - a tomato corer works wonders for coring strawberries. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of the sugar. In a large mixing bowl, blend together the remaining sugar, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs until just foamy, add the vanilla and melted butter. Stir in the strawberries. Combine the two mixtures, blending until the dry ingredients are just moistened through. Scrape the batter into the pan and bake for 60-70 minutes, or until a toothpick of piece of uncooked spaghetti inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove the pan from the oven and cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes before removing the bread from the pan.

The first time I tried this recipe (largely adopted from one we picked up while perusing Penzeys Spices - www.penzeys.com) I wasn't so sure about the cinnamon and strawberry combination, but after we ate the loaf we agreed it was heavenly. I buy my cassia cinnamon from Penzeys, and while it's spicier and more intense than regular cinnamon the taste is incredible.

There are a few things that I think one needs to spend money on to buy quality kitchenware namely... good properly sharpened knives, good cookware, and good spices. Once you've used good quality items in these categories (it took me 25 years before I did for some of them!), you'll never go back to using just any old thing.

After the requisite cooling time, I took the bread from the oven and ate a piece with Garofalo burro di buffala - a pale gold butter made from buffalo milk and Ficoco, a fig and cocoa spread from Croatia.