Cranberry Orange Bread

Try this fruit-forward sweet treat that will vastly improve your coffee break.

Cranberry orange bread, ready to eat.

I first made this gluten-free bread as a challenge from my friend Danielle, who travels a lot and sends me postcards with recipes from her destinations. One recent trip was to New England, where she visited cranberry bogs. When she texted to tell me she’d found some postcards with cranberry recipes, I told her I wanted a recipe for cranberry bread. She couldn’t find one, so she wrote: “Find your own damn recipe.”

Challenge accepted!

So here is my own damn recipe, which I tested multiple times using either chopped fresh cranberries or dried cranberries and different types of oils. Fresh and dried cranberries both seemed to work, so I suggest using fresh berries when they are in season in the late fall and using dried the rest of the year. The bread’s flavor also relies on fresh orange zest and juice and nuts. (I didn’t try using juice from a carton, but believe that would also work.)

On my last test version, I allowed the batter to rest for about 30 minutes before mixing in the cranberries and nuts and, when baking, I used the probe that attaches to the oven to measure the internal temperature of the loaf. I pulled it out at 200 F and the texture was perfect. I didn’t try those techniques when making my banana bread or zucchini spice bread, so I’ll have to revisit those recipes and see if those tweaks improve them. (Both are gluten-free baking tips I learned from reading Rachel Ciordas’ Next Level Gluten Free on Substack. If you want to learn more about gluten-free baking, I suggest following her.)

If you follow the recipe below, I hope you’ll agree I rose to Danielle’s challenge.

You’ll need a 9 x 5 inch baking pan and two large mixing bowls.

Ingredients:

Dry Ingredients for Bowl 1:

• 2 ¼ cups gluten-free flour blend (I used King Arthur Gluten-Free Measure for Measure flour)

• 1 cup granulated sugar

• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

Wet Ingredients for Bowl 2:

• ½ cup fresh-squeezed orange juice

• ½ cup whole milk

• 1 or 2 eggs (about 3 ½ ounces out of the shell; I was using rather small eggs, so ended up weighing them)

• 1 teaspoon grated orange zest

• ¼ cup sunflower oil

Chunky Ingredients:

• 1 cup cranberries, either chopped fresh or whole dried (I measured the fresh berries after they were chopped, not the whole berries)

• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

  

  At the top are the dry ingredients in one bowl, and all of the wet ingredients will go in another bowl. The chunky ingredients—cranberries and nuts—will be added to the batter after it rests for 30 minutes.

Directions:

• Mix the dry ingredients together thoroughly in one bowl: flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt

• Beat the wet ingredients together in another bowl: milk, eggs, oil, orange juice, and orange zest

• Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix with a spatula until you have a smooth batter

• Allow the batter to rest for 30 minutes and warm up the oven to 350 degrees F (325 convection/fan)

• Stir in the cranberries and nuts with the spatula and scoop the batter into a buttered 9 x 5 inch baking pan

• Bake at 350 F (or 325 convection/fan) for approximately 45 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 200 F or an inserted toothpick comes out clean

• Let the bread cool before removing it from the pan and serving

  

  I used my oven’s thermometer probe to tell me when the internal temperature reached 200 F. The result was a perfect texture!

  

  A beautiful loaf!