| Baking bread is a wonderful harvest activity to put you in the mood for the season, so don't feel overwhelmed at the amount of bread-baking that goes into this recipe--give it a try!
In this recipe, you simply take four seasonally-appropriate breads and present them as a face-stuffer for a large gathering. Here are my suggestions:
Directions:
Bake each of these loaves, or any combination you prefer. (These have been chosen for this harvest recipe because they use bananas, corn, apples, and cheese, which are to some extent traditional foods for the harvest holidays.) Cut into strips or blocks that are easy finger-food size, and arrange in a basket--and take to a gathering or picnic! Bring sweet butter and honey!
When bringing this bread to a location where it will be in open air for more than a couple hours, it's better to use a container that can be sealed!
NOTE: If you're not such a masochist as to bake four loaves of bread on the same day, try getting into the holiday spirit by making a partial-week project out of it. I suggest baking the breads in this order: First banana bread, then apple, then cheese, then cornbread. Banana bread keeps the longest and stays moist for quite a long time without having to even be refrigerated. Apple bread stays good a long time too, but slowly becomes more mushy and less fluffy--try not to make this more than two days in advance of the date you'll need it. Cheese bread, because it does have cheese, will spoil earlier--you'll want this in an airtight container. And cornbread should be made a day in advance at the most for best freshness. Also, the cheese bread is the only one that requires rising time. The others are either flat breads (cornbread) or they do their necessary rising with the help of baking soda.
Banana bread and apple bread are very moist while cornbread and cheddar bread are drier breads, so keep this in mind when storing them in a shared container! A moist bread will "sog out" a dry bread and make it inedible if you don't wrap them.
Yield: 8-10 servings
Source: The four recipes were inspired by various sources--see their individual writeups for specifics--but the idea was original.
Use for: Lughnasadh, Mabon
Psst--I've got a photo of this dish at http://members.aol.com/ivycleartoes/bbasket.html , if you want to take a look!
Pagan recipes
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