I just cannot seem to get away from baking with fruit this month. After baking chocolate all weekend long, I’m back into fruit land once more, compliments of Natalie from Oven Love who gave us the Oatmeal Breakfast Bread as our Tuesday with Dorie week’s choice.

Oatmeal is not fruit, you may say… well yeah, but don’t let the name fool you. It has oats and a combination of spices and any dried fruit of your choice. And technically, I’m on the fence if calling it “Bread” would be appropriate, since it did not involve using yeast or kneading or even a rolling pin!

But at the end it did not matter, Tom was once more in high heaven, because not only did it have fruit, but OATS!

I do have to come clean, that while I may complaint about some of the baking options, I’m glad that joining the baking clubs has force me to try things that other wise would never really appeal to me in print in the first place.

Like this Oatmeal (and dry fruit) bread.

I made this last night, after we came back from 1 hour of jumping up and down on 15,000 square feet of trampolines – the new “craze” here in town. We were 3 “super fly” for 30 of those 60 minutes. The other 30 were spent sitting down and catching our breath and calling our mommies.

So you can imagine my feelings when we got home – baking, at 8pm at night? All I wanted to do was stop my legs from shaking and the only way to do that was sit and the couch and let the world come to a complete stop.

Except, that I took another peak at the recipe and realized that I could have this done and into the oven in less than 15 minutes. The best part? All I needed was a spatula and 2 bowls! And we all know how much I love not using the KA or the electrical hand-held mixer.

It’s pretty straight up recipe. Mix the dry ingredients, mix the wet ingredients. Mix everything together; pour into the baking loaf pan. Then finish it off by covering the top of batter with this yummy tasting/smelling topping made of walnuts, cinnamon and brown sugar. Next step? Into the oven it goes for 60 minutes. The dry fruit of choice for me was dry apricots, cherries and cranberries.

The hard part of this whole recipe was to actually have the house smell so delicious; we were salivating the whole baking time. Then it really drove Tom crazy not being able to touch the bread once it came out of the oven. Dorie recommends eating it only when it fully cold, and totally hold off on the lure of cutting it once it comes out of the oven.

I take my instructions seriously. So it sat on the counter with strict orders of “DO NOT TOUCH”

Did I mention how seductive those smells were?

No? Well then I guess you will need to run and make one, to fully understand the will-power it took for us to not cut into this until this morning for breakfast.

To see the other variations visit TWD and to get the recipe, visit Oven Love.