Flour on the Floor: Cranberry Nut Bread

Banana bread done right can be sweet; add butter, it turns savory.  But tart?  Never.  I happen to like a bread that bites back.  Of course, I also still challenge my husband to Extreme Sour Warhead contests (you try holding one of those candies in your mouth for more than 30 seconds; keep a tissue handy for your tears).  This week’s Cranberry-Nut bread promises to offer some of that tart thrill. 

I have never made any type of cranberry dessert.  Not even from a mix.  This is perhaps why I overestimate the ease with which I can pick up some cranberries from the store.   Like many lucky Americans, I have become accustomed to eating anything I want at any time of year (thanks California for your long growing season!).  I did have some vague sense that cranberry season is in the fall; that’s why we have cranberry stuffing at Thanksgiving, yes?  I will also admit that I have never bought cranberries that have not been dried or juiced or canned.  My children must assume that cranberries are can-shaped. 

My advice for baking off-season with cranberries is to call stores ahead to save you from buckling and re-buckling a child’s seat after each store with her asking questions like, “But Mommy, the man said no cranberries in May.  Didn’t you hear him?  Why are we going to another store?  I’m hungry.  Why are you so mad at that other car?”  On my third stop I finally scored 2 bags of frozen berries at Garden Fresh Market in Northbrook.

Ingredients assembled, we start measuring.  My daughter is becoming a pro at leveling a tablespoon with her tiny index finger held flat.  Ingredient number four is fresh orange juice.  The Baking Illustrated editors assert that fresh home-squeezed juice is the winner “hands-down” over commercially prepared juices made from fresh oranges or concentrate. 

This provides the opportunity for us to use the very expensive, very elaborate, dust-covered juicer that my husband bought years ago as a gift to himself for losing weight (kind of like joining a fancy gym after you meet your fitness goals).  Weight lost, he was quickly de-motivated to make fresh juice in the mornings.  We have re-located this Cadillac of juicers (big and showy) from Orlando to Ithaca to Chicago to Southern California and now Glencoe where it makes its home high and out of the way in our butler’s pantry.  In fact, when I heave it onto the counter my daughter says, wide-eyed, “I’ve never even seen that thing.”  She looks a little afraid of it, but quickly warms to the idea of pulling as hard as she can on the lever to reduce the orange halves to pulp.  She pushes me out of the way and does the job herself.  Once she tries this fresh juice—she keeps sipping it on the sly—I start to worry that we’ll run out of oranges before we have the needed 1/3 cup of it.  Mommy doesn’t want to make another store trip.

My daughter continues wanting to do it all herself.  She is becoming independent in ways wonderful (she picks out her own clothes!) and difficult (she picks out her own clothes!).  But when I look up from the recipe to see that she has scooted her stool to the sink and has started washing the dirty measuring spoons and bowls, I am grateful for her burgeoning initiative.  And so very proud.

I am ashamed to admit that I use her dishwashing distraction to move things along a bit.  We have chopped cranberries and toasted pecans that need to be added to the already over-mixed bread batter.  I quickly dump them in and stir lightly.  When I ask my daughter if she wants to help scrape the batter into the pan for baking, she glances at the batter lumpy with nuts and berries then at me suspiciously before leveling that index finger right at me, “Did you add ‘dose things?”  She is a mad hen. 

In my defense, I am leaving in the morning on a trip with my husband.  There are bags to be packed and notes to be left for the conglomeration of friends, sitters and family that will be pitching in with the kids while we are gone.  Tick tock. 

I feel clumsy and silly trying to explain that Mommy has other things to get done and that even this one-on-one project is compromised by my to-do list.  In the end, I promise not to do parts of the recipe without her in the future (and I won’t) and her brow un-furrows a little.  Her interests feeling subverted are not worth the few moments I saved; it looks like she is not the only one still growing.  She scrapes the batter then takes the bowl to the sink while I put the bread into the oven.        

When the timer goes off signaling that the bread is ready, we all gather in the kitchen like wolves.  The recipe very clearly says, “Resist the urge to cut into the bread while it is hot out of the oven; the texture improves as it cools making it easier to slice.”  But, if you have a child who has washed berries, juiced oranges, measured ingredients, washed bowls and cups, waited the one hour cooking time and is now overdue for bed, you slice into that bread straight from the oven, even if you burn your fingers a little doing it.  Then, that bread crumbles and falls apart at the edges.  But it’s delicious just the same.