Lemon Blueberry Bread

I’m going to start out saying that this dish is gluten free as well as vegan. I’ll also mention that this recipe will need some tweaks to make it taste better, and probably shouldn’t be made as is, but I’ll get to that more later. I’m assuming you remember that failure of a cake I made a little over a month ago. If you don’t you can check it out here. So as a Health type major, Christian’s last class of the semester asked them to bring in a homemade food item to class. However, the catch was that you had to make at least one healthy substitution to the dish in order to get points for this. Automatically my mind went to baking, but I was nervous of how the results would turn out.

I finally start to feel like I’m going to get back on track writing posts and of course I get sick and end up sleeping all day… I’m feeling much better now, I really don’t know what happened being that it only lasted one day…. Oh well at least it’s mostly over now. It has also been harder to post because I’ve been cooking less creatively lately. Being that we only have one week left at school, I’ve been trying to use up all the odds and ends left over in our stockpile. That means less going out to buy ingredients to try fun new meals and more eating the boring boxes of hamburger helper reserved for the days where I didn’t feel like cooking as much. (My lovely grandma tried to stock me up with tons of non perishable food items before we left for school, apparently we didn’t end up getting around to using all of them through the year.)

I found a recipe on Pinterest that seemed like it would work well for this project. The original idea was from Julia’s Album, but by the end it looked nothing like the original recipe…

Everyone in the class had to bring something in, but I didn’t think that a lot of other people would think of making a dish that was accessible to everyone. So I wanted to change this dish into a gluten free, vegan alternative, so that everyone could have a treat. To do this, I replaced the all purpose flour with the same amount of quinoa flour, used 1/2 cup applesauce in place of the two eggs, I read online that margarine was a vegan alternative to butter and my container of margarine was so used that I couldn’t read the ingredients list, so I hoped that it was but for those of you who are strict vegans I’m sure that you have a great butter substitution in your fridge. I also replaced the milk with almond milk. I was very proud of myself, because sometimes you get afraid that when you make all different kinds of substitutions like that, you loose the chemistry that makes the recipe bake well. But this seemed like it was actually going well.

I got some muffin pans and a bread pan from the dollar store, high quality? no. Incredibly cheap and will get our money out of them? Definitely. In only two weeks I’ve already used my new muffin tins twice, making it already $1 per use, (since I got two of them). One day I will for sure have nicer ones but these will definitely get the job done for now.

(It’s thin because I used the other half of the batter to make muffins.)

That is until I took a bite…. The quinoa flour was not a good substitution. It completely took over the whole thing. You could just smell the plantiness wafting out of it. Not that I don’t like plants, it’s just not the taste I look for in my baked goods. I really wanted to try using Almond flour, but at over $13 a pound I wasn’t really feeling like spending that much for a class project (especially a class that he was already acing and didn’t need the extra points). I’m really interested in All purpose flour substitutions, I’ve heard so many bad things about all purpose that I’m ready to try something new. Apparently a girl in his class agreed as she spit it out after one bite. Not every one is a winner I guess!

Otherwise I think that everything else worked really well. I chose not to make the glaze because I’ve been keeping my powdered sugar in the same drawer as my spices and that was not a good idea.. The flavors all mixed together and was not good. Oops. Oh well.

Overall I would definitely give this recipe another try, of course with the recommended changes though. I hope you can take this recipe and make it your own. Please let me know your favorite all purpose flour substitute too.

Happy Eating & Thanks for Reading!

Ala