CRANBERRY BREAD, WITHOUT CRANBERRIES

The Goddess (my new name for the princess’s school teacher. The Goddess orders, and we obey) made cranberry bread in class on Friday, and then handed out the recipe, titled “Grandma’s famous Cranberry Bread” to the children to take home. On Saturday, I forgot to take the recipe to the supermarket, and hysterics and sulks ensued. On Sunday, we were emergency shopping for ingredients: flour! sugar! baking soda! baking powder! (what’s the difference?) raisins! frozen cranberries! And several hours later, we were busy chopping cranberries, grating orange rind (an amazingly difficult activity, if you’ve never done it) and mixing ingredients to bake cranberry bread.

Despite being familiar with cranberry through my obssessive rereadings of the Little House series as a child, I never felt tempted to take advantage of my residence in Canada to actually buy any. Now I know how wise I was- cranberries can be considered as the North American equivalent of the Iranian berry zereshk: round, small, red and sour. Except Canadians don’t cook cranberries with rice and chicken and saffron, they do… different things… with them. Like bake bread.

So the recipe was quite good, the actual bready-part tasted like cake, and it is possible we were over-enthusiastic with berries since the princess said the Goddess used only half a cup, whereas we used a cup and a half, following the recipe by the letter. It is just the damn cranberries were so sour, and absolutely exploding out of the the bread, so every bite of bread gave us a mouthful of cranberries. I’m surprised Grandma’s blood pressure didn’t fall to zero after eating her creation, and that she had enough energy to pass it on her descendants.

Today, I am going to bake another loaf of cranberry bread, now that I have the ingredients (the princess has lost all interest in baking, meanwhile, and is nagging at me for her friends to come over). Only, it will be a hundred percent raisin cranberry-bread- cranberry bread without the cranberries.

Tags: baking, Canadian recipes, cranberry bread, family, recipes, school recipes