Raisin Egg Bread

Happy Remembrance Day everyone! I am so glad it’s a long weekend. I love long weekends and what better way to celebrate than with a nice home baked bread, filling your house of heavenly aromas. This egg bread is a sweet raisin bread with lots of eggs and it’s so delicious and this bread could be made anytime, but traditionally it may be served at Easter or Christmas.

This recipe will make 2 big loaves, so you may cut the recipe in half, if you don’t need both loaves, however, it would make a beautiful gift for someone  and they will love you forever.

This bread is perfect for your morning breakfast toast, or it would make an excellent bread pudding.  I also used fresh yeast for this bread this time, but it works just as well with active dry yeast.

First we need get the yeast mixture going, so in the bowl of your mixer, add the yeast,  4 tsp of sugar, 1 egg, and the warm milk and mix everything well. Let it sit in a fairly warm place for 20 minutes or so. If you use fresh yeast, it will bubble up much faster than dry yeast, but either way you need to wait until it bubbles up.

Next step is optional, but I like to soak the raisins in some good rum, it will make them plump and just give them that nice rum flavor.

In a small sauce pan, heat up a cup of milk and a cup of sugar, until the milk is warm and the sugar dissolves. Set this aside. In another small bowl, combine the melted butter and oil.

Separate 2 of the eggs, but keep the egg yolks for the egg wash, and the place the whites in another small bowl with the other 3 whole eggs and beat them lightly with a fork.

Also add the vanilla extract to the eggs. Now it’s time to add all these things together. So to the mixer bowl, add the warm milk mixture, the butter and oil mixture, eggs, raisins and grated lemon zest and juice of a lemon.

So now all the wet ingredients are together in the bowl. Mix these together until they are well combined. Begin adding flour. At first I used the paddle attachment and as the dough got thicker I switched to the hook. Alternatively, you may do this by hand and knead the dough yourself. You may not need to add all the flour, you have to feel the dough, it should be a smooth dough and a sticky dough. Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl and rub the oil all over the dough so that it doesn’t dry out.

It’s a lot of dough, so you’ll need a fairly big bowl. Place it in a warm place and let it rise. One trick I usually do is I first turn on the oven at 200 F degrees for a couple minutes, no more, just so that it warms up the oven, then I place the bowl with the dough, covered up in a clean towel, inside the oven with the oven door open. As the heat dissipates I close the oven door to keep it warm inside longer. I’ve found that this helps the dough rise faster and you don’t have to wait for hours and hours. Anyway, after the dough doubles in size, you’ll need to punch it down, and let it rise again.

After the dough is done rising a second time, preheat your oven to 400 F degrees. Knead the dough for a couple minutes, then divide the dough in half. Now you can braid these braids however you want, in 3, 5 or 6, I wanted to be fancy so I braided them both in 6. If you’re doing the same, cut each half into 6 pieces, and roll each piece into long strips about a foot long.

Braid the strips, now if you’ve never braided in 6 before, it can be pretty confusing at first, but you can find many videos on youtube that will show you and teach you how. Braid both loaves and place them on a buttered baking sheet, making sure there’s plenty of room between them, because they will rise some more.

They already look gorgeous. Let them rise again, and now you can brush them with the egg yolks we saved. You can also sprinkle some granulated sugar over the top, or some almonds, or just leave it plain as I did.

Bake the bread for about 30 minutes until it’s nice and golden brown. Trust me when I say you will love this bread.

If you make this you will impress everyone! My husband loves this bread, and although it’s a raisin bread, he makes sandwiches with it and will eat it with anything. It is really really good. I hope you give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Enjoy!