Carrot Raisin Nut Bread

So Ashley and I have a restaurant that we will go to on occasion, Mimi's Cafe. It's a place that kinda has a French/New Orleans style flare, the food is okay, but they have these muffins and bread that are pretty amazing. We enjoy the carrot raisin nut loaf that they bring to your table at dinner. When we first tried it we both enjoyed it so much! Well I found another recipe in the Todd Wilbur cookbook Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2. In the book he has come up with a recipe for Mimi's carrot raisin nut bread, and I made it last night. The recipe makes two loafs, so as is customary with the excess baked goods at our house the second loaf went to work, where I passed it out as I could to the crew. All loved it! I got multiple thumbs up from every one! If you want just the recipe for the carrot raisin nut bread, you can purchase that from Todd Wilbur's website. Over all a hit in our home, and at my work, will be doing this again!

One of the lessons I learned was about molasses, not an ingredient I can remember ever using before. It has a very interesting smell, and I was not sure what molasses was. Ashley looked it up for me while I was cooking then I looked it up myself, it is actually a by-product of processing sugar or sugar beets. Interestingly there was an explosion in 1919 in Boston that apparently killed 21 people, according to about.com the molasses actually exploded, though the article does not indicate how but alludes to the fact that Boston's streets were covered in molasses, and we thought traffic could be slow in Austin. The other thing that the article stated was that molasses was originally the sweetener of choice for Americans until WWI when we Americans switched to processed white granular sugar. A few other interesting tid-bits, but you will need to read the article yourself. Hope you enjoy the recipe, the bread, the book, and the lesson! Thanks for reading!