Eggless Strawberry Chocolate Almond Bread

When it’s a good day, even bread feels like cake!

I totally just made this up and I’m impressed at my own proverbial skills! It’s easier to make up stuff when food is involved! Don’t you all agree?

It’s just been a real hectic October and in all my chaos, my poor little blog baby is not getting my attention as it should. I’m hoping to come back to full form soon. Maybe in a couple of more weeks once Diwali is over.

Today’s blog post is actually a really easy recipe I baked a couple of weekends back. This was actually our Sunday morning fresh baked breakfast. And when I sat down and ate this, I just wanted time to stand still and let me enjoy this forever. This is a classic example how many of your little favorite things can come together and give you one big favorite thing. Who says that’s not possible? I have proof that it is both possible and enjoyable!

The recipe is adapted from Madhuram’s Eggless Cooking blog and her recipe on Eggless Chocolate chip Zucchini Bread. Anytime I need an eggless recipe, her site is the first one I stop by. Thank You Madhuram and please keep your wonderful recipes coming.

Start off with mixing the dry ingredients –
All purpose flour – 1 ½ cups (you can substitute with whole wheat bread flour for a more fibrous bread)
Baking powder – ¼ tsp
Baking soda – ½ tsp
A pinch of salt

Mix all ingredients well – you can actually sieve them all together for a clean and smooth mix.

Then, add a whole cup of fresh cut strawberries in here.

Followed by another ½ cup of semi sweet or dark chocolate chips.

Now for the wet ingredients. This is basically where the butter and eggs would be added in a normal cake. However, in this eggless version, we're going to be adding some other basic ingredients.

Vegetable oil - 1/2 cup
Sugar - 3/4 cup (personally, I though this bread was too sweet. I'm thinking of cutting this down to 1/2 or even 1/4 cup for more of a bread taste)
Bananas - 2 ripe
Vanilla essence 1/2 tsp (Optional - I did not add this - no culinary reasons...just laziness!)

Just add all the ingredients to a blender or mixer and blend into a smooth wet mixture.

Pour this over the dry ingredients and mix well.

Gently incorporate the dry and wet ingredients together.

Here's the bite - add about 1/4 - 1/2 cup of sliced/silvered almonds. This adds excellent texture to the bread.

Pour into a well greased loaf pan. Run a toothpick over the batter so that any big bubbles are broken up - that way you won't have a big hole in the middle of your slice!

Top off with some more silvered almonds.

Bake in a preheated oven at 350F for about 50 mins. Yeah - this does take time. So, plan accordingly. If you want to make this for breakfast - don't start at 10:00 clock Sunday moring like me. We all almost felt like we had brunch after we ate this at 11:15!! If its a sunday, you are forgiven in my books for being a lazy mom and letting your family starve and just smell the fresh baking bread with growling stomachs!

Here it is - takes only about 5 mins to prepare but about an hr to bake. Once that is done, we are back at about 5 mins to eat it all up.

Slice yourself a big one...shhhh..

Here's a cross view - the softness of the strawberries and the crunchiness of the almonds and the sweetness from the semi sweet chips all just come along beautifully to give you a perfect bite.

Feel free to use your own favorite fruits or nuts to bake this. Like I said, this can pass off for cake easily if you bake it a square or round pan. But it taste great as little slices of bread too.

Enjoy. Peace Out!