Recipe: Lime Quick Bread

Lime Quick Bread
rec.food.recipes/Ottermum (Jeanette) (2002)
Source: Beat This! cookbook
Makes one 9-x-5-inch loaf

As with my recipe for Lemon Squares, this started out as lemon bread and got gentrified along the way. It's not that I don't like lemons; it's just that they don't have the same cachet as limes. (Lemons are the old friends you left at home when you moved to the city; limes are your new best friends.) Since juicing limes takes a little more work, lime dishes seem more appropriate for company. Also, I like the pleasantly scary look of a green-flecked baked good.

Bread:
3 cups cake flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup less 2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (Don't put the lime juice into the milk or the milk will curdle. This won't really affect the bread, but it will look sickening.)
1 tablespoon grated lime rind

Glaze:
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1/4 cup sugar (preferably superfine)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 9- x-5-inch loaf pan.

Into a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set them aside. Cream the butter and sugar until light. Add the eggs, one at a time. Then beat in the milk, the lime juice and the lime rind. Add the dry ingredients and mix only until they're combined. (I never know what cookbooks mean when they say that. I guess they don't want you to go on blindly beating and beating the batter. But why would you?)

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 60 to 70 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the middle of the bread comes out clean.

Meanwhile, make the glaze: stir together the glaze ingredients until the sugar is dissolved. If you think of it, give it a stir occasionally while the bread is baking, so the sugar won't settle out.

The moment the bread is done, without taking it out of the pan, poke holes in it with a skewer and pour the lime glaze over the top.

Cool the bread for 1/2 hour. Then carefully invert it onto a rack, remove the pan and turn it right-side up to finish cooling. Serve the bread the same day you make it. It doesn't freeze well.