Amish Friendship Quick Bread

Do you remember getting those Amish Friendship Bread plastic bags of dough stuff? Please tell me you've done this at least once in your life. Basically, you get this starter and add milk and flour and stuff to it throughout a week or so. You then bake some of it, and divide the rest into more starter bags, which you can either keep for yourself or give to friends, which is the whole point of the "friendship" bit in the bread name.

Whether this is actually an Amish tradition, I cannot say. Whatever the case may be on that front, the bread itself is really tasty. But what happens when you don't want to wait around, don't want to have to keep adding milk and kneading and coming up with endless starter bags?

You find a recipe on the internet that makes the bread without all that work, duh.

Amish Friendship Quick Bread

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Cooking Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Whisk together the flour and baking soda in a separate bowl. In your mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. Alternately mix in the buttermilk and flour mixture, 1/2 cup milk, 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup milk, 1 cup flour, etc. until it's all mixed together. I recommend this versus the stick it all in at once route because then stuff flies everywhere!
2. Distribute half of your batter into 2 greased loaf pans (so that's 1/4 of the batter for each pan).
3. In a small bowl, mix together the topping. Use 3/4 of that to sprinkle the tops of each of the loafs, then add in the remaining batter, smoothing out the tops. Sprinkle with the rest of the cinnamon mixture and swirl with a knife to get a design inside the bread.
4. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a tester in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 20 minutes before removing and serving!

Recipe via Redfly Creations


In photos:

Butter, sugar, eggs. Your typical setup for most baked goods.

Alternately mix in your buttermilk and flour. You want to do this rather than just dump it all in at once. If you do the dump method, stuff will come flying up and out the sides of your mixer. Trust me, I've been there.

Use half of the batter and divide it between your two loaf pans.

Sprinkle 3/4 of the cinnamon mixture between the two loafs.

Spread the remaining batter between the two pans, smooth the tops.

And sprinkle the rest of the cinnamon stuff on top. Swirl the tops with a knife to get a fun design inside.

Bake for 40-50 minutes, until it looks something like this, and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Leave that in the pan for 20 minutes to cool before removing.

Slice 'er up and enjoy! Also great with butter spread on top. Though, what isn't good without some butter added? I mean. Right? Also, that design is kind of weird. Looks sort of like a butt. Pretend it's something pretty, like a butterfly or something. Yeah.