Apricot Cranberry Bread -- The Holiday Baking That Carries Us Forward

First week without Marvin driving himself. He took it better than I feared and worse than I hoped, which is to say he handled the practical adjustment with dignity and felt the loss of it in his face whenever I picked up the keys. He does not say anything about it. He says nothing about the things that cost him the most, which is a Marvin quality that predates the diagnosis and which I have both admired and found difficult throughout our marriage: he holds his losses quietly, internally, in whatever private space men of his generation were taught to put the things they couldn't fix.

I drove him to his card game on Wednesday — he plays gin rummy on Wednesday evenings with three men from the synagogue, friends of forty years, and this week I drove him and waited in the parking lot for two hours reading a novel and not minding the waiting at all, because the card game is his and the men are his and the two hours of not-being-Ruth-being-driven is his, and waiting in a parking lot is a very small price to pay for his dignity.

Passover preparations are beginning in earnest. I pulled the Passover dishes from the garage — the set of dishes that lives in boxes for fifty weeks and comes out only for the seder, the same dishes my mother used, chipped on several rims from forty-odd years of once-a-year use. I cleaned and inventoried. I made my list: the haggadahs, the seder plate, the items that require ordering, the items that require cooking, the items that require my mother's handwriting on the index card. I still cook from her index cards. I have a binder full of them. Her handwriting is round and confident, schooled in the style of the 1940s Bronx, and reading it is a minor act of time travel every time.

I made hamantaschen this week — Purim was last week — the triangle cookies filled with poppy seed or apricot, another recipe from the binder. My students got a bag each. My students always get a bag each when I bake holiday cookies, because seventeen-year-olds are hungry constantly and also because if you show up with food, they listen to you just a little bit more. I have been exploiting this dynamic for twenty years. I intend to continue.

The apricot filling in this week’s hamantaschen came from the same binder index card it always comes from, and the bag I sent home with each of my students had the same slightly-too-much-powdered-sugar dusting it always has. But what I kept thinking about while I baked was the apricot itself—tart and sweet and slightly nostalgic—and how well it translates into this Apricot Cranberry Bread, which has the same holiday-kitchen feeling without requiring triangles and dough-crimping patience. If you have apricot on the brain and people to feed, this loaf is the natural next step.

Apricot Cranberry Bread

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 55 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes | Servings: 12 slices

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup fresh or frozen cranberries, roughly chopped
• 3/4 cup dried apricots, diced
• 1 large egg
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
• 1 tablespoon orange zest
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven. Heat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan and set aside.
2. Combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
3. Add the fruit. Stir the chopped cranberries and diced dried apricots into the flour mixture, tossing to coat them so they don’t sink during baking.
4. Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, orange juice, melted butter, orange zest, and vanilla extract.
5. Bring it together. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined—do not overmix. The batter will be thick.
6. Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and smooth the top. Bake for 50–55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is golden.
7. Cool before slicing. Let the bread cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 195 | Protein: 3g | Fat: 3g | Carbs: 40g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 175mg