First: Use Up Food You Already Have on Hand! (Part 2/2)

Friday night is pizza and sci fi tv show night at our home, so I use the time that I would have spent cooking dinner to prep for future meals. 3/13/2020 was no different. I had a bag of mandarin oranges that were old, so I zested them all with my handy microplane. 

Once the zest dried I put it into a small glass jelly jar for later use to add some pizzazz. The mandarins were juiced and juice saved in fridge...not sure for what yet....

I used a cheater yellow cake mix to make a coffee cake. I used 4 eggs and a small can of undrained crushed pineapple I had in the cupboard in place of box instruction ingredients. In a small bowl I melted 4 Tablespoons of butter then added 1/4 cup of monk fruit sweetener, a drizzle of molasses, and some shredded coconut and chopped pecans. I sprinkled this mixture into the bottom of a greased and floured bundt pan. I topped that with some of the cake batter. Then I sprinkled on some milled flax seed meal, brown sugar, coconut and pecans and topped that with remaining batter. Bake to package instructions. Yummy. 

While that baked, I started a loaf of the popular "no knead" bread baked in a Dutch oven that is popular on pinterest. I tossed some dried cranberries with ground cinnamon and homemade Vanilla Bourbon extract to coat before folding it in to the dough. Covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the microwave to wait until morning. 

The next morning my husband told me the bread mix smelled like whiskey.....so it must be time to bake! The loaf was shaped into a ball using more flour than I should have had to for it to hold its shape. The cast iron Dutch oven went in oven on convection at 375 degrees to preheat. Once loaf was in oven the pan was covered. After 20 minutes the lid was removed and tomer set for another 20 minutes. Then another 15 minutes....it was lighter than I usually bake my bread but it came out lightly golden and smelling delicious. Toasted with butter is my favorite way to eat this bread...

What is your favorite bread? Do you like to bake bread? How do you like to eat it?