Delicious Fruit Loaf

When I bought Paul Hollywood's book 'How to Bake' I thought this recipe for Fruit Loaf looked lovely. I have a sweet tooth too so sweet bread with fruit in it sounded like my kind of bread!

 

The recipe says that you should use a food mixer for this recipe with a dough hook, as the dough is 'rich and sticky' but I haven't got a dough hook so I just used my food processor with the ordinary 'blade' attached, and this seemed to work okay.



 

 

The flour, salt, instant yeast, butter, sugar, warmed milk and water are all placed into the mixer and mixed together. The recipe says to mix this for 7 minutes in total which seemed a long time but I ended up doing it for that length of time to help to get the correct elasticity in the dough. Once you reach this elasticity you add the fruit and cinnamon and mix again for 2 more minutes. I added sultanas, raisins and apricots but left out the mixed peel which I don't like! 

 

This is the dough once mixed; its really soft, almost runny. And as you can see from this photograph the yeast is very active! 

 

I only left my dough to rise for an hour before I checked it and it had already doubled in size (the recipe says 2-3 hours). The dough was still very soft and runny, so much so that I thought I'd done it wrong!! So don't be worried if yours is the same too!

 

I hadn't realised when I started the recipe that this recipe actually makes 2 loaves, as once the dough has risen you divide it into 2 portions. So if you like you could do half the recipe quantities and make just one loaf.

 

When I was knocking the dough back I was still a little worried that the dough was too soft and runny but I formed it into the two loaves and left it to prove, as the recipe stated, and hoped for the best!

 

The loaf once it has proven.

 

Once the loaves had baked for about 20 minutes I iced them straight away while the loaves were still warm. The icing is simply icing sugar, water and the zest of a lemon.

 

And I needn't have worried about the softness of the dough as the loaves turned out perfectly okay! Here are the completed loaves!

 

The loaf is really sweet and the fruit swells up really well in the baking so is soft too. I ate my bread with nothing on it as the bread is sweet enough without the need to spread butter, and with the sweet icing on top there is no need for any further flavour. Beware though, its very moorish so one slice is never enough!