Guinness Bread

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a happy, healthy, and productive 2013. Me, I'm trying to get back into good habits. I won't say that I'm making resolutions -- the guilt when I fail would crush me -- but the end of the holiday season is as good a time as any to work harder on eating healthy, getting some exercise, and posting to the blog.

As you all know by now, I am an absolute egg fiend. A day without eggs is a day without sunshine; a breakfast without an egg will ensure that I am hungry again in an hour. Sometimes, when I have time to chop and shred in the morning, I grab whatever veggies and cheese we have in the fridge and we start the day off with a veggie-egg-and-cheese scramble. However, many days have early meetings, and early meetings combined with a reasonably long commute mean I need to whip up something fast.

While my husband is walking the dogs and making me coffee (bliss!), I'll quickly grab some eggs and some bread and make the classic eggs in a basket. When I'm feeling even more rushed (or lazier, let's be honest), I just toast some bread in a pan and top with an egg over easy. Now, I've had lots of different types of bread with over easy eggs, or with eggs in a basket. But hands down, the best bread for a hearty bread-and-egg breakfast is this Guinness Bread.

This is such an easy recipe to whip up. No kneading is required. All you have to do is toss several ingredients together and bake.

But be warned: This bread does not rise the way yeast breads rise. I thought I would be clever and split it into two slightly smaller regular loaves, but I ended up with two flat loaves. I simply could not make eggs in a basket with this bread, given how depressed it was; it was all I could do to toast it in the pan and toss on an egg over easy. And, if and when I make this bread again, I will definitely just make one loaf. That being said, this bread was absolutely made for egg yolk. The rich, slightly bitter flavor of the bread melds perfectly with a creamy yolk, yielding an absolutely decadent breakfast with only two ingredients. Well, if you ignore whatever you use to coat the pan. And of course all of the ingredients you use for the bread.

While I'm not sure that the bread will hold together wonderfully for sandwiches, you need to make this bread, if only for breakfast and for secretly shoving into your mouth slathered in butter and honey when no one else is looking. Your loaf will be gone before you know it.

Taste: 9.5
Ease: 9
Comfort: 8.5 with eggs!