Cranberry Chocolate Chunk Bread #SecretRecipeClub

Anyone feel like a little Christmas in June??

I honestly wasn't meaning to make a Christmas recipe when I picked this month's Secret Recipe Club selection!  This month I got to check out a completely new to me blog, Eat. Live. Blog.  As I was looking through Renee's recipes, I found her Cranberry Chocolate Chip Bread & knew this was the recipe I needed to try out!

Princess P loves cranberries so I thought this would make a great little treat for our weekend breakfast.  I knew I had all of the basic ingredients needed for the recipe so I just added more cranberries to my grocery list & off I went.  Come time to make the bread ~ I had no chocolate chips!!  For some reason, I was confident that I had a bag of white chocolate chips in the cabinet & I was going to use those instead of regular chocolate so I didn't even bother double checking.  And of course, welcome to my luck, I had none.  No white chocolate, no chocolate, no chips of any sort.  Well, fudge.  Just cranberry bread would suck.

But then I saw it, my recipe saver!  There sitting on top of a bag of candy corn (don't ask) was a dark chocolate candy bar.  Let's chop that bad boy up & that's close enough to chips for me :)

CRANBERRY CHOCOLATE CHUNK BREAD

YIELD: 8-10 slices

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INGREDIENTS:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1.5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• juice of 4 navel oranges ~ about 3/4 cup
• zest of 1 navel orange
• 2 tablespoons shortening
• 1 egg, beaten well
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• 1.75 ounces (about 1/2 of a 3.5 ounce bar) dark chocolate, chopped
• turbinado sugar {optional}

INSTRUCTIONS:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 x 5 loaf pan.

In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda & salt. In a separate bowl, mix together the orange juice, orange zest, shortening & egg. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until well blended. Fold in the cranberries & chocolate.

Spread the dough into the loaf pan. Sprinkle the dough with a thin layer of turbinado sugar {optional}. Bake the bread for 45 – 55 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the bread comes out clean. Remove the pan from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. Remove the bread from the pan and place on a cooling rack to cool completely.

RECIPE INSPIRED BY: Eat. Live. Blog.