hi i'm kat and welcome to my kitchen this morning i'm going to be making apricot pecan bread this is a recipe that i came up with several years ago it took a lot of trial and error to veganize this favorite but it's really good and it's super healthy there's no sugar in it use maple syrup as a sweetener it's got whole wheat flour and wheat bran so i recently served this for example at a heart health seminar as something to show people how you can still eat some good treats and be healthy so um the first thing that you need to do is you need to get a cup and a half of dried apricots and you need to slice them in thin slices and then you need to add a cup and a half of water in a small pan you need to bring that to a boil and you need to boil that for once bring to a boil then you reduce the heat to like a simmer and you want to simmer it for about 10 minutes keep an eye on it though because just depending um like today mine got done in about eight minutes so and then you have a nice thick um apricot mixture here to work with and it's nice and moist so you can see the thin um strips of apricots that i sliced this morning so um so that's what we start off with and i'm gonna put that in my electric mixer here just so i have some more room so i'm going to add that and you also want to let the apricot mixture completely cool down before you add it now i'm going to add three tablespoons of vegetable oil normally i use earth balance vegetable oil spread which is a great vegetable oil butter substitute um but i didn't have enough of that today so i'm gonna just use uh canola oil and um normally what you do with the earth balance spread is that you let it soften and then you add it so we're gonna see what happens with the vegetable oil i'm sure it will work just fine and then i'm going to add maple syrup this is one cup of organic pure maple syrup please do not use um the enchantments or something like that maple syrup is expensive but it's totally worth it that tastes like pure maple syrup um is a huge difference so i'm gonna put this in my electric mixer and i'm just gonna start to blend all of that together all right so that's starting to come together so now i'm going to add one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract i try to buy fair trade vanilla whenever possible and then we also need to add and i'm going to turn down the speed on this so i don't splatter we also need to add a fourth a cup um usually i use soy milk creamer in this recipe however i don't have any soy milk creamer today and i really wanted to make this bread so i'm substituting it for coconut milk and coconut milk is really rich so it's very good for baking or making any kind of vegan cream sauces so i'm going to add my coconut milk now great and then i'm going to add a half teaspoon freshly grated orange rind self-explanatory it is what it is i just used uh a cheese grater um on the smallest grapes to grate that orange and i'm gonna turn that up a little bit great so i'm going to grab the camera so you guys can see what this mixture is starting to look like and then we're going to sift together the dry ingredients here is what our apricot maple syrup milk substitute etc mixture looks put together my dry ingredients i have one cup of wheat bran and i have one and a half cups whole wheat flour organic flour and i have one tablespoon or one excuse me one teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder and i'm just gonna use this wire mesh strainer and i'm gonna sift it together now i do have a traditional hand sifter that i use sometimes but i have to say that i am all about trying to make cooking and baking and anything in the kitchen easier and using a hand sifter is not easy it is however a great workout for the forearms but um truly i hate using it so i either usually sift with a fork or do this so that is a confession from cat's kitchen they're all sifted together and i'm ready to add them to my wet ingredients as you can see i have changed the attachment on my mixer because i find this attachment to be better once you start mixing dry ingredients the whisk i made the mistake of very early on in my baking career and in my stand up mixer career to put way too many dry ingredients and when i was still using my whisk attachment and i bent it so um i now use this when i am mixing in dry ingredients for baked goods so i'm just going to pour about half of this in to start and i spilled a little bit which is bad i'm very messy in the kitchen so it's something i'm trying to work on because i'm trying to not be so wasteful but a little mess isn't gonna hurt and it's not a big deal it's like not that much so i'm just gonna start to mix this in and it's starting to blend together really nicely so i'm gonna add the rest i'm gonna be way more careful this time not to spill it everywhere martha stewart would not approve of the wastefulness that i just displayed or the messiness for that matter and i'm just going to mix this in a little bit here and then i have one cup of chopped pecans that i'm gonna put in once this is starting to come together a little bit more which is gonna be like right now so first thing i'm gonna do though is scrape the sides of my mixing bowl with the spatula just to make sure we're getting all the goodies and everything is combining evenly and then i'm gonna pour these in and then just turn this back on and it's pretty much ready to go so um one thing i like to do to try to save energy is i try to wait until um i'm ready to put my ingredients in the proper baking pan before i preheat my oven you'll notice that most recipes uh they start always with preheat the oven to 350 well what if it takes you 40 minutes to get this all put together um especially if you're not an experienced baker it could take some time and there's chopping of some ingredients here and all that to me it just seems wasteful to have your oven on that whole time it really doesn't take very long to preheat your oven to 350. so i'm going to preheat my oven to 350 right now and then i'm going to get my loaf pans i'm going to make this for a kind of smaller breads because i have to deliver them to a couple of people so i just thought maybe i'll make little ones so i'm going to grease these lightly with some palm oil shortening and then i'm going to fill them up so while my oven's preheating i will get that ready so here's the dough so my oven is preheating and i'm just gonna fill these a little bit over halfway i'm just gonna start by putting a scoop in each one and i think i'll have enough of all the batter it's in here i'm going to scrape this it's really good it looks like this one's kind of low so add that to here and then i'm just going to kind of press down with my spatula and move the batter around so that it's even and also we want it to look kind of pretty when it comes out especially if we're taking it to people as gifts oh see my oven's ready it doesn't take long at all it was like perfect timing i'm just done filling these so there's a little tip for you here are my little breads ready to go in the oven okay so i'm gonna put these in there we go one hour so here so my uh breaths have been baking for about 40 minutes and since they're in these smaller loaf pans i want to just test them and see how they're coming along so i'm gonna get out my cake tester i'm gonna see if they're getting close to being done because they look like it they're like a nice golden brown color so i'm gonna just poke the thickest one with the cake tester and it came out clean so they're done so i'm gonna take these breads out and i'm going to set them on my cooling rack here turn off my oven turn off my timer i'm going to let them sit here for about 10 minutes before i attempt to take them out look at these beautiful little loafs of apricot pecan bread fresh out of the oven cooling on cooled off a little bit so i'm gonna try and get them out i'm gonna just go along the edge i don't like taking stuff out of the pan when it's still really hot because i feel like you run the risk of having it fall apart but i also don't want these to keep baking more which they will do in these hot pans because they're they're done so we'll see what happens hopefully they won't fall apart okay so i'm just gonna gently flip this over aha and they fell out really easily it pays to have good bakeware let me turn them over so the tops don't get marks on them and we're just gonna leave them sit for a couple more minutes until they're ready to sample and they're not too hot but once we cut into them they probably will be so um i'm gonna leave these sit for about five more minutes and then i'm definitely going to sample one because i'm hungry and i've been waiting for this still really warm so it's going to be delicious and it's really moist i'll bring over the camera so you guys can see the middle take a couple pieces here i'm gonna put a tiny bit of earthbound spread on it it doesn't need it but since it's hot out of the oven and it's gonna melt i think it'll be really delicious just a little extra very well worth the wait this is delicious i love the apricots with the orange zest and little nutty flavor from the pecans i definitely suggest trying this at home it's a really nice bread to serve for brush i'm going to give you guys a little look at um what the inside of the bread looks like here cut up and then we're going to sign off so here is what the apricot bread looks like sliced as you can see it's really moist and it'll keep like that for so much for stopping by this baking edition of cat's kitchen i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you get out there and do some baking have a great day