Sultana Bread

This week's loaf is a sultana bread. This is a very light-textured bread with custard powder in the recipe which gives it that nice golden colour. As the name suggests it is a sweet bread so it's ideal for breakfast. Or if you're like me, it will do equally as well at lunch slathered with some peanut butter.

This recipe gives a slightly wet dough which can be difficult to work with and also means that you will need to bake this in a bread tin. This recipe gives about 6 servings.

Ingredients

360g strong white flour

7g fast action dried yeast

160ml water

70g sugar

1 egg

12g milk powder

12g custard powder

4g salt

40g butter

100g sultana

Method

1) Add the flour, yeast, water, sugar, egg, milk powder, custard powder and salt into a mixing bowl and combine.

2) Turn the dough out onto the worktop and knead until the dough is smooth and springy when poked.

3) Cling film and leave to rise until doubled in size in a warm area.

4) At this point soak the sultanas with enough water to cover and leave until they are plumped up. Drain and dry with some kitchen paper.

5) After the dough has doubled in size, gently turn out the dough and shape into a rectangle about 1/2 inch thick. The length should be roughly the size of your bread tin.

6) Sprinkle the sultanas all over the dough and roll up the dough. Transfer your dough to the bread tin placing the dough seam-side down. Gently ease the dough into the corners of your bread tin so that it is level.

7) Cover and leave to rise until doubled in size. For this recipe I used a lidded bread tin so I only raised the dough about 1cm below the top of the bread tin so that I could put the lid on. If you are not using a lidded bread tin don't leave it to rise too much over the bread tin. As the dough is very soft it has a tendency to rise and droop over the sides.

8) Once your dough has risen nicely, bake it in a pre-heated over at 200C/180C fan for about 40mins, or until the the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow.

9) Leave to cool before slicing, or simply tear away at it and eat while hot!

Obviously we are still very new to blogging so if there are any improvements you'd like to see when we post recipes then please let us know.

-Aubergine