Sweet breakfast bread

I made a large amount of rich sweet bread dough in the breadmaker using the following:

• 2 cups water
• 2 eggs
• 2 large spoonfuls of butter (say 3 tbsp)
• 8 tbsp caster sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 7 cups plain flour
• 3 tsp fast action dried yeast

This made a lot of dough and I refrigerated half of it and used the rest to make a fruity stuffed bread. 

I rolled out a large rectangle of dough, filled it with some chopped and peeled apples, dried cranberries, crushed walnuts and a sprinkling of cinnamon. You can use pretty much anything as filling: dried blueberries, pecans, chocolate, raisins, sultanas, dates, apricots etc.

Cutting outward from the filling to make radial strips and folding these over resulted in something rather homely looking...

Which was baked at 200 degrees Celsius for about 25 mins to give something no less homely but still quite delicious. This is great as a breakfast bread and I think it would go really well with some custard as a dessert.

Peanut butter jelly breakfast muffins

Years ago I read and interview with Kate Weatherell in a food magazine where she talked about her book Sugar and Spice which intrigued me. Today, on impulse, I went into a bookshop and saw it there (on sale btw). I have a cookbook addiction...

The following recipe is inspired by her "raspberry and cinnamon breakfast muffins".

I tried to seal in the jam as much as possible but since I was sure some would leak out I baked them at 165 degrees instead of her suggested 190 degrees as I hoped that would prevent any escaping jam form caramelising/burning thus sticking the muffins to the tray.

Makes 12

• 160 g plain flour
• 110 g caster sugar
• 100 g oats
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 2 heaped tsp cinnamon
• 180 g Greek yogurt (or creme fraiche or regular yoghurt, to be honest you could probably use flavoured yoghurt and it would work fine)
• 2 tbsp honey
• 60g butter, melted (let it cool a bit so it doesn't scramble the eggs)
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp milk
• 2 large spoonfuls for peanut butter (be generous)
• 50 g chopped nuts (totally optional but I used a mix of pecans and walnuts)
• about 12 tsp jam (I used raspberry)

Grease you muffin tray. Mix all the dry ingredient then add all the wet ones except the peanut butter and jam. Stir in the peanut butter. Put a spoonful of the mix into each muffin hole (you'll have to spread it out a bit), add a tsp of jam and seal it in (as much as possible) with another spoonful of mix (a bit bigger than the first one). Bake at 165 degrees for about 25 mins (check if they are firm). Cool on a rack. Delicious warm but not hot coz hot jam is like LAVA :)