I have confessed this before and will continue to confess how I am a born carboholic. And that includes the full range - breads, pastas, rice, chapatis, tortillas, noodles ..... But when it comes to bread I eat very little of your usual supermarket loaf of white bread. That bread is missing everything - the crust, the texture, the baked aroma .... and even when it comes to freshly baked loaves of bread from a bakery, I am now able to distinguish between a good loaf and a bad one. I hope to be able to bake more bread and blog about my experiences and also to share how it turned out, did it meet expectations or not. Before my experiments start to look like my professional workplan, let me share with you the last piece of bread that I made from scratch.

I have a dear friend whose kids love raisin bread and I have promised her that I will share a good recipe. But a recipe is never good till I do a bit of research into it and of course try it out myself! So here I was determined to make a loaf of cinnamon raisin swirl bread and make sure that the recipe was easy for others to replicate. To be honest recently, my research has been reduced to reading comments on my shortlisted recipes at AllRecipes.com :) Whatever it takes it get this right the first time!

So here it is folks! A tried and trusted recipe for Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread. The original recipe can be found here . For my baking, I reduced it to one-thirds and then made some modifications.

Ingredients

1/2 cup milk

1/3 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

1 egg

1/6 cup white sugar

1/3 teaspoon salt

1/6 cup butter, softened

1/3 cup raisins

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon milk

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 tablespoons + 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon butter, melted

Directions

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. Let cool until lukewarm, dissolve the yeast in this milk and set aside till frothy.

Add the water.

Take the flour in a bowl. Mix in milk, water, eggs, sugar, butter or margarine, salt, 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder and raisins.

Start to knead the dough and add more flour to this mixture gradually to make a sticky, soft dough.

Knead dough on a lightly floured surface for a few minutes. Place in a large, greased, mixing bowl, and turn to grease the surface of the dough. Cover with a damp cloth. Allow to rise until doubled.

Roll out on a lightly floured surface into a large rectangle 1/2 inch thick. Moisten dough with 2 tablespoons milk. Mix together 1/3 cup brown sugar and 2 tablespoons cinnamon, and sprinkle mixture on top of the moistened dough.

Roll up tightly; the roll should be about 3 inches in diameter. Tuck under ends. Place loaf into well greased 9 x 5 inch pan.

Lightly grease top of the loaf. Let rise again for 1 hour.

Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 45 minutes, or until loaf is lightly browned and sounds hollow when knocked. Remove loaf from pan, and brush with melted butter or margarine. Let cool before slicing.