Quite often friends on Twitter will bake together and compare results. Someone will come up with a recipe and toss out an idea of making it and others will grab onto the idea, and before you know it, a few people are tackling the same recipe at the same time, kitchens spread across the world at times.
Phyl noticed that Nick Malgieri had a new bread recipe on his blog and soon Phyl had Nancy and I lining up ingredients and settling on a time to make and bake the bread. (No easy task as Phyl and I are in the same time zone, but Nancy is currently out in California so she had to get up nice and early to bake with us.)
I made the recipe according to the instructions, with just one minor change, instead of a total of 3 cups of raisins, I used only 2 as I knew we wanted this for toasting for breakfast and it has been my experience that if I have too many raisins, they fall off in the toaster and burn. That said, if I wasn't using the bread for toasting, I would have used all 3 cups of raisins as they were really good in this bread.
The bread was wonderful from beginning to end: it went together like a dream, the dough is silky and lovely to work with, the fragrance from the raisins was wonderful as I was kneading it, the dough behaved wonderfully well on both the rises, and....you guessed it: a truly wonderful loaf of raisin bread resulted from all my efforts! The key word here, obviously being: wonderful.
We couldn't resist, we sliced it warm and ate a piece standing at the counter...the aroma was so enticing and it was just too much to think of not trying a nice warm slice five minutes out of the oven.
I also toasted a piece and it is excellent toasting bread, the crumb nice and light and crispy with a good crunch, it is good plain or with a little cinnamon sugar on it. Definitely a repeat.
Here's the link to the recipe so you can make it in your own kitchen. Oh, and be sure to thank Nick for the recipe as it is going to be in his new bread book coming out in September, so it's like a little gift to print that for us on his blog. Thanks, Nick...we loved it.
