Chocolate Chip-Marmalade Bread
I make this (or some version of it) every month or so. It’s based on my blank-slate quick bread recipe that is Joy of Cooking’s Irish soda bread (minus the raisins and caraway), which I alter and adapt with abandon. If you like making tea loaves and the like, I recommend you just write down that recipe on an index card and stick it on your fridge.
It also helps to have a half dozen jars of marmalade laying around — in this case, a slightly bitter five-citrus variety (with the faintest whisper of cardamom) that I made and put up in February. In case you’re dying to know: tangelo, satsuma, heirloom navel, pink grapefruit, and blood orange.
Another trick I use is gonna make me sound like an End Times Prepper, but it’s powdered buttermilk. I just don’t use buttermilk often enough to warrant its real estate in my fridge, and the store-bought stuff isn’t even real buttermilk anyway, so who cares? Mixing the powdered stuff with whole milk makes a nice and moist, tangy tea cake, pancake, or biscuit. (You can also just add water, but it’s not as good.) IF YOU DO IT THIS WAY: just mix the powdered buttermilk into the dry ingredients and add the regular milk to the wet ingredients.
Chocolate Chip-Marmalade Bread
Preheat oven to 350F, grease a 8.5″ x 4.5″ x 2.5″ loaf pan and line it with a strip of parchment.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups AP flour
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- fat pinch of kosher salt
- 4 tbsp (half stick) unsalted butter, melted and warm
- 1 cup buttermilk (or 3 tbsp powdered buttermilk plus a little more than 3/4 cup of regular milk)
- large egg
- 1/4 cup marmalade
- 1/2 cup bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips (or hack up a dark chocolate bar into bits and use that)
Mix the dry ingredients together in a big bowl. Mix the wet ingredients together in a different container (I think it’s easiest to melt the butter in a Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave, then pour in the buttermilk to the 1 1/4 cup line, and then mix in the rest of the things right in the same container). Pour the wet stuff into the dry stuff and stir until just combined. Don’t go balls to the wall or you’ll start developing the gluten and your loaf will be tough. Fold in the chocolate chips, scrape the batter into the loaf pan, and then sprinkle a little sugar on top if you like. Bake for about an hour (check with a toothpick after 50 minutes to see if it’s still wet and doughy in the middle). It’s done when a toothpick inserted comes out dry.