Perszyk+

Recently I came across a recipe for pecan peach amish friendship bread on one of blogs in my feed reader.  We’ve had cans of peaches in our pantry for a couple of months now becuase Tysen asked me to buy them, but after I brought them home, he swore he never asked for them.  When I came across this recipe, I thought it would be a good use of one of the cans.  The only problem was that I didn’t have the Amish friendship bread starter, so I decided to make it myself using the recipe at Allrecipes.com.  Last week I started the starter, and planned for day 10 to be today since I had the day off and would have some time to bake.  Not knowing who to give the starter to and not wanting to burden anyone, I decided to make a bunch of bread that I could then freeze.  I ended up making 3 types of bread (each type making enough for 2 5″x9″ loaves) and freezing  some starter so that a fourth kind of bread could be make in the future.

1) Pecan Peach Bread (made according to recipe linked above, except I used 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose flour for the 2 cups of flour)

2)  Banana Walnut Chocolate Bread (I used the basic recipe, then again swapped 1 cup of whole wheat flour for 1 cup of all-purpose flour, and used banana cream instant pudding, and added 1 chopped banana, 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, and 1/2 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips)

3) Lemon Poppy seed with glaze (I used the basic recipe, the zest of one lemon in place of the vanilla extract, 1/4 cup of black sesame seeds (didn’t have poppy seeds) in place of the cinnamon and nuts, and lemon instant pudding).  For the glaze, I used 1 cup of confectioner’s sugar mixed with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice (squeeze from the lemon used for zest).

Once all the breads were baked and cooled, we had a taste test. For the first bread, I wish I had saved the juice from the canned peaches and made a glaze.  I thought the bread could have been a bit sweeter, or maybe contained additional spices.  The moistness of the bread was good, though, and it was nice to get bites of chopped peach.  The second bread was good, but got a little burned on the bottom.  On the whole, the first two breads were much denser than the third because I used whole wheat flour.  The third bread was both of our favorites.  Both the glaze and bread were bursting with lemon flavor.  I’d been wanting to make a lemon poundcake or lemon squares for a while now, and this cake satisfied my desire for lemon dessert.