Wild Blackberry Bread & Lemonade

 

I could not let blackberry season go by without baking something with blackberries. This 'Wild Blackberry Bread' was a recipe that I thought sounded really delicious. 

The bread had a lot of blackberries throughout and a fresh-made blackberry juice glaze.

To quench our thirst on this August day, I also made fresh-squeezed lemonade with edible flower ice cubes. 

I have always wanted to make these ice cubes, and they are so easy that I don't know why I hadn't done it earlier. I just put calendula, chamomile, and borage blossoms in an ice cube tray, filled it with water, and froze. It is so simple! 

Ingredients:

Bread:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 1/2 cups fresh blackberries

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup milk

1/3 cup butter, melted

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon lemon zest

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350°F. In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon together. Gently toss in the blackberries, coating them with flour. 

In a different medium bowl, combine sugar and next five ingredients and mix until evenly distributed. Add the sugar mixture to the blackberry/flour mixture and gently stir until evenly blended. Pour into a greased loaf pan (8.5" x 4.5") and bake for an hour or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for ten minutes while still in the loaf pan, and then remove the loaf from the pan and continue to cool for an hour. 

Icing:

Crush 1 cup of fresh blackberries through a wire mesh, straining the pulp and seeds out to get around 2 tablespoons of juice. In a small bowl, whisk the 2 tablespoons of blackberry juice with 1/4 cup confectioners sugar. Keep adding until it becomes the consistency you want to drizzle over the bread.

Recipe adapted from: Cookin For My Captain

Lemonade

6 lemons, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 quarts water

Instructions: 

Take your lemons and roll them with your palm on the cutting board. Squeezing them in their rind. Cut them in half and then extract the juice with your preferred method. Pour the juice of the six lemons into a pitcher, add the sugar, cool water, and stir until the sugar dissolves. Serve over ice. 

Recipe adapted from: Mennonite Community Cookbook by Mary Emma Showalter

In Victory,

Sherry