Pomegranate Tea Bread

With the texture of a banana bread and the decadent topping of a cake, this tea bread turned out delicious!

My head was spinning with ideas to use a nice quantity of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. It's delicious to drink, but the opportunity to experiment is too tantalizing to pass up. I surfed through many recipes for inspiration, but came up with mostly those that called for pomegranate seeds so I needed to fend for myself and hope I could come up with something decent.

I used the pomegranate juice in place of other ingredients. Without it I would have added more milk to the batter, and a bit more butter to the topping. The pomegranate flavor is not super strong (a result I was prepared for), but it lends a little special something to it that you can't quite put your finger on. I cut small square servings, but you can certainly make them larger if you want to.

Pomegranate Tea Bread
makes about 24 small servings

topping:

1/4 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup chopped dried cherries
2 Tbs melted unsalted butter
2 Tbs pomegranate juice (POM Wonderful 100% is perfect)

batter:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 Tbs baking powder
1 Tbs baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
6 Tbs melted unsalted butter
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup pomegranate juice
1 cup plain nonfat yogurt
3 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly butter and flour a 9x13 baking dish.

In a small bowl, combine the topping ingredients: 1/4 cup brown sugar, nuts, dried cherries, cinnamon, 2 Tbs each butter and pomegranate juice. Set aside.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, 1 1/2 cups brown sugar, baking soda and powder, and salt. In a medium bowl, whisk the yogurt, milk, pomegranate juice, eggs, and vanilla extract. Gently stir the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined. The mixture will be light and riddled with air bubbles.



Scrape into the baking dish and bake for about 40 minutes. Remove and add the topping mixture. Bake for another 10-15 minutes. Allow to cool before slicing and serving.

Give give this a try- if you can stop yourself from drinking all the juice straight from the bottle. I had to confiscate it from Ray to get this made!

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