Easiest Cinnamon Swirl Raisin Bread Recipe

Hi Bold Bakers, today we are going to make one of my favorite breads, a homemade version of the sun-made raisin bread. This is absolutely delicious and a perfect bread to learn how to make. It's really easy dough. So we're gonna start out by mixing together our wet ingredients. I have some whole fat milk in here. I'm going to add in a little bit of water into that. A little bit of butter. Nice salted butter. I always use salted butter. And some lovely plump, really good raisins. In they go there. Now you can do this step on the stovetop, I'm going to do it in the microwave because it's easier and it's the exact same results. We're gonna pop it in and we're gonna let it heat up. When this liquid is lovely and warm, it will hydrate and plump up those lovely raisins. So you want to let this sit here for a few minutes, give it a little bit of time, and let everything get nice and soaked. So after a few minutes, when this liquid has cooled down and I can see my raisins are nice and plump, I'm going to crack in my egg. I adore this dough because it's an enriched dough. It has butter, it has whole milk, it has fat, it has an egg. It's just really absolutely delicious and it's just like the store bought version. Actually, it's better than the store bought version because you made it at home with love. Those are our wet ingredients. Now let's talk dry. Here I have my big stand mixer. Into this I'm going to add in my all-purpose flour. You can use bread flour for this recipe, I'm not opposed to that, but it is a softer bread with a softer bite so you don't need that extra gluten. Into our flour we're going to add a little bit of salt, always for flavor. If you don't have salt in a bread, you can end up being quite flat. And then here I have some instant yeast. The beauty of instant yeast is that it goes in to your dry ingredients just like sugar, salt, flour, whatever. If you're using active yeast, I have a note in my recipe of how you can convert it. You just have to sponge that in your liquid and it's just an extra step. So I like to do it this way. Mix those ingredients. The yeast on one side of the bowl, the salt on the other. For people who are new to bread baking, salt can retard yeast and make it not active. So you just want to put it on separate sides of the bowls, mix them in and then mix it all together. I'm going to turn on my machine and I'm going to add in my wet ingredients, raisins and all. So you want to knead this dough for around 6-8 minutes on medium speed. Right now it looks a little bit dry but I'm not adding more liquid. I'm going to hold off because this dough will get a little bit wetter. It'll start to pick up all those dry bits. By the time you come to the end of your kneading, it'll be a lovely smooth elasticy dough and it'll be in one lovely big ball. And we're done. Look at that. So if you've watched a lot of Bigger Bolder Baking and me making my bread doughs and pastries and things like that, you'll know that unless it's supposed to be a very wet dough, this is what you want, a nice firm one ball of dough which is really nice. It has cleared the bowls, completely clear and it is ready. So I have a bowl here. I'm going to put a little bit of vegetable oil, a flavourless oil, a tiny splash in here. I'm going to turn my dough around in it. The reason we do this is that our dough is going to proof in this bowl and we don't want to make life hard on our dough, we want to make it easy. And with that little bit of oil when it's proofing, the dough will just glide up the side of the bowl rather than struggle. You can use a shower cap. I don't have any right now so I'm going to use cling wrap, cover it, get nice and tight. These two doughs don't like to get air on them because they can form a skin. So we want to cover it up, make sure there's no air getting at it, put a little tea towel on for extra snugness. Now for those of you who have made dough before, you'll know the rules about doughs. They like to be taken care of, they like to be fed, they like to be loved. So you know we fed this dough, we have made it nice and warm and now we're just going to give it some time. It needs to proof for around an hour, an hour and a half or so, double in size and then we can move on to our next step. So my dough has had an hour and a half to proof, it's looking lovely. I really like this dough, it's just really easy to work with. Look at that. Beautiful. See how puffy it is? Fantastic. So I'm going to turn it out now onto my surface. If your New Year's resolution is to learn how to make bread, you've landed on the right video because this is a lovely first bread. It's a good introduction to yeast, it's not too intimidating, it's not sourdough. And the results are just really good. So you kind of think if bread making is this delicious and easy, then I'll definitely want to try more. Now, I'm going to roll it onto my surface. I have big lumps of raisins here but just so you know, when you're kneading your dough, if your raisins kind of break up and end up mushing into your dough, that's totally fine. I've made that bread too and it's super delicious. How we doing? 9 inches, boom, this is like my superpower, by 18 inches. Almost 18. Almost my superpower. Okay, lovely. Now here I have our filling. A little bit of granulated sugar, a little bit of cinnamon. I'm going to keep this very easy and not make too much of a fuss. I'm just going to mix these two ingredients together with my fingers. You'll probably notice that there's no sugar in the actual dough. We're keeping all of the sweetness for that lovely swirl in the middle. I'm going to scatter our cinnamon sugar all over the surface. Usually I say give it a bit of a border but I'm not saying that here. I want you to go all the way to the edge because I want to make sure that there's enough cinnamon sugar throughout the bread. Now simply just like you were making cinnamon rolls or a Swiss roll, we are just going to take this smaller edge this time because we want it to fit into our loaf pan, the 9 inch side and we are going to roll it up and just pull it back a little bit towards yourself while you're rolling to make sure that there's not a gap in the middle where you see that lovely swirl. Here's our pan, here's our loaf, in it goes. Beautiful, all our hard work is done now because all we have to do is wait. I'm going to cover it up again and I'm going to let it proof one more time. This timing is roughly around an hour or so. We want it to rise to the top of the tin. We want it to get nice and big and that's when we'll bake it off. So now we just have to wait. So once your dough is proofed it will look like this, nice and puffy. It will have risen all the way up to the top of the pan and it will be lovely and soft onto your fingers. I just, I love a dough like this. I love a dough in all stages but I just love how like, how beautiful it is in the tin. So before we bake it, you want to brush this with some egg wash. This egg wash will make it really lovely and golden brown. Egg wash is also really important so your bread doesn't end up looking dry. Let's not hang around any longer. Let's get this beautiful loaf of bread into the oven. Bake your bread at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, 200 degrees Celsius for roughly 35 to 40 minutes until a lovely golden brown. Our bread is out of the oven and it not only smells amazing but it looks gorgeous too. It is a beautiful golden brown loaf that absolutely just smells like fall and winter and all the comforting things you can imagine. Once your loaf is cooled down it is ready to slice. Look at that beautiful swirl. This is what I was waiting for. The gorgeous indentation of the cinnamon sugar right there in the middle. To me there's something kind of nostalgic about this bread and it reminds me about being a kid and having it here in the United States. It is so delicious for grown ups and kids alike. Another bonus about this recipe, it makes fantastic French toast and bread and butter pudding. So you've got a million uses for it. I really hope you enjoyed this video. Check out all my other videos while you're here and I'll see you back here again next week.