BBA Challenge #11: Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread

The good news is my camera and computer have gotten over their differences and are now talking to each other (though, I have to say, through no help of my own). The bad news is I apparently forgot to take many pictures of Bread #11. Too bad because it’s all gone–I made this over a month ago!

As appears to be an emerging pattern in my BBA Challenge loaves, I once again left out the nuts, so I suppose you can say I made Cranberry Celebration Bread. It’s funny that as a result of commercial breads often being so bad, my first instinct was to think that this bread would not be very good–I must have had some memory of bad cranberry bread past, as I imagined something gummy and pasty-tasting, with some artificial cranberry taste!

It’s funny how I haven’t found this to be a problem with the extracts I’ve been using in the BBA breads–the Greek Celebration Bread, for example, had quite a few flavors and was just delicious. I don’t know how “natural” extracts even are so it makes you wonder what’s in all those commercial breads all the more–if you can taste how artificial it is, “shudder to think!”

Now, as I mentioned I don’t have a lot of photos but the ones I do I think are rather pretty (if you find pictures of raw dough pretty, big “if”). I managed to braid these up rather evenly as opposed to the Challah which had that big lump that only grew in the baking process. So practice does make perfect! And the bread was quite good–no pastiness or false notes. I think I’d still opt for the Greek Celebration Bread over this, or if I ever make it to the latter half of the alphabet, the BBA Pannetone (I love pannetone–have I mentioned this, ha!). Or maybe I should just add the walnuts 😉

Braided loaf, set to rise:

Cranberry Celebration Bread