Blueberry Orange Quick Bread

Spiderman and I definitely have a sweet tooth, but it is certainly not as sweet as it used to be. I can’t eat tooth achingly sweet frosting without feeling ill and I refuse to make a recipe that calls for more than ¾ cup sugar. I can’t justify it for my heath or my teeth. But I do love a bit of sweetness. I got a good deal on blueberries at the market on Saturday and so I thought I’d try my hand at a gluten free version of Blueberry Orange Quick Bread. This recipe originally came from my vita mix cookbook. What I liked about it, besides the fact that it was low in sugar and fat was that it used a whole orange pureed as the liquid component so you got all the fibre as well as the juice. I just subbed in gluten free flour and a bit of xanthan gum and kept the rest the same. The loaf didn’t rise up at all--duh, it wouldn’t as there was no gluten in it--but it was a moist, compact, lightly sweet, bursting with marble sized blueberries and hint of orange quick bread.

Sorry there are no pictures. Someone (naming no names) thinks he accidentally left the camera on  after downloading some photos and the batteries are all run down. But nobodies perfect.

Blueberry Orange Quick Bread

If you want to make this with regular flour just use 1 cup white and 1 cup wholemeal then do the rest the same.  To make it gluten free, but with other flours then you need 1 1/3 cup wholegrain flour and 2/3 cup starch.

Preheat your oven to 160C/325F. I just set my dial to between 150 and 175. Grease a loaf pan.

Sift all the flours together in a large bowl and whisk to combine them.

2/3 cup buckwheat flour

1/3 cup quinoa flour

1/3 cup teff flour

2/3 cup tapioca starch

1 tsp xanthan gum

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

Place all the liquid ingredients in your blender. But not the blueberries, obviously.

2 TB butter or margarine

¼ cup water

½ cup sugar--I used Demerara

1 egg or one flax egg (Mix 1 TB flax meal with 3 TB hot water until it goes all gooey)

1 orange peeled and pulled into segments

¼ inch strip of orange peel

1 tsp vanilla essence

To stir in in a minute:

1 cup frozen or fresh blueberries--frozen is supposed to help them not to “bleed” so much all over your dough. It didn’t work this time as my blueberries were enormous--the finished bread looks like a Jackson Pollock painting

Blend until the orange is fully liquefied. Mix the wet with the dry and fold in the blueberries.

Bake for 60-70 minutes until a knife comes out clean.

That’s it! The loaf seemed very delicate when it came out of the oven--I was afraid it would crumble. Thankfully it did not. I let it cool in my loaf pan for about 10 minutes then I *carefully* tipped it out onto a wire rack and let it cool for several hours while I went to church. When I got home it was easy to slice with a serrated knife. The taste was moist and lightly sweet and the blueberries were all exploded like paintballs throughout making it look very pretty. I am storing it in an airtight tin.