- Apple Tumble Bread and Garage Sales

Fans of Hounds Who Cook,

Tonight we are starting our blog while our Person is going about gathering items for a garage sale slated for tomorrow. We are not interested in garage sales unless they are someone else's (because of the smells - garage sales are great for smells). This is also why we hounds love to cook. We like smells. Right now there are a few sources of apples smelling up the kitchen. They are soft-ish apples with thin yet leathery skin that comes off in your teeth separately when you try to eat it. We don't know what kind they are. We are thinking they would be better baked up than eaten raw and Guthrie especially disdains fruit flies, which are circling the house determining their way in. Guthrie is very particular about gnats and the like. I, Eli, don't like them much either, but I don't have any kind of fixation on them like he does. Guthrie is a dog who consumes himself with fly, bug, and gnat chasing. We live in Wisconsin, so we also call them no-see-ums. (On Guthrie's special natural anti-bug spray, sold in Wisconsin, it lists "no-see-ums" as one of the pests. Who knew. We are orginally North Carolina hounds and only moved here one year ago.)

So our first recipe is something apple. We tried Grandma Madeline's Swiss Apple Pie - a sort of custard pie situation - and we won't be repeating that. Not a success. There's something she knew that we don't about making Swiss Apple Pie.

Tonight we have apple bread in mind. We need a lot of fiber - not so much us as the People we cook for - so we thought apple bread was nice place to hide it. We're starting with a recipe from the WorldWideWag (what dogs call it) and varying it as dogs do.

Eli and Guthrie's Apple Tumble Bread
(because the apples tumble through the batter in chunks. I, Eli, made that up.)

2 cups whole wheaty flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup blackstrap molasses
1 cup (scant) unsweetened applesauce
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups peeled and chopped apples
chopped walnuts

Oven: 325F (no need to preheat)
Pan: 8 x 4-inch loaf pan slathered with cooking spray.

First, chop up your apples. You don't want to do that after the batter is stirred up and waiting because the baking soda and baking powder will start to rise and you'll stir it down again by adding apples too late. Get Guthrie to chop them ahead if you have to.

Then, stir together flour, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder and cinnamon. Stir together molasses, applesauce and vanilla and stir into dry ingredients until just moistened. Fold in apples and nuts. Spread batter into prepared pan and bake for 50 minutes or until knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Tips from Guthrie: You, the baker, can substitute apple sauce for the oil in any dense quick bread or cake (like carrot cake). It's fat free then and no one's the wiser. (This is me catching an apple peel curl as it lofted from the countertop. Click to see the action detail of the shot.)

Tips from Elias: Our person, "Me," likes gingerbread with applesauce and this is a little bit of a twist on the same combo. Molassesy like gingerbread and appley like...applesauce. (This is me catching an apple chunk on the fly, and me putting the bread in the oven - which we don't clean too often.)