Cinnamon-Sugar Quick Bread Recipe From Katie Brown: Weekends

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What grandma didn’t have a red plastic bag of cinnamon raisin bread on hand? Relive that childhood nostalgia with a loaf of homemade cinnamon bread. No raisins in this simple quick bread recipe (you’re welcome).

Table of Contents

• Take Back Your Weekend with “Katie Brown’s Weekends” Cookbook
• See Inside “Katie Brown’s Weekends” Cookbook
• Who Is Cookbook Author Katie Brown?
• About This Cinnamon Quick Bread Recipe
• Other Books by Katie Brown
• Related Resources

Take Back Your Weekend with “Katie Brown’s Weekends” Cookbook

“Katie Brown’s Weekends: Making the Most of Your Two Treasured Days: More than 130 Recipes, Projects, and Ideas“ is a cookbook to help you reclaim your weekend.

Your weekend matters. Working on the weekend contributes to poor mental health, with the negative effect of weekend work one and a half to two times greater than overtime work on weekdays for white-collar workers, suggested a 2020 study.

Even hackers take a break on the weekend — 83% of all spam emails are sent during the work week, indicated a 2017 report.

Why do we avoid doing nothing? Instead of “catching up on work emails” and never entirely shutting off worker bee mode, let’s try a different idea.

Get in the kitchen. Make a creative mess. Try something new. Share with a friend. Read a cookbook from your cookbook collection (or maybe that’s just me).

“Katie Brown’s Weekends” wants to help. Let it.

See Inside “Katie Brown’s Weekends” Cookbook

In my past life (also known as “pre-divorce), I’d wake up at the crack of dawn to bake whatever caught my fancy. I liked that quiet kitchen time. You know what? Some things don’t change. I just have to plan ahead a little more.

I throw the dry ingredients for this cinnamon bread together the night before. Then, it’s a cinch to whirl it all together and bake.

This recipe for cinnamon bread makes two large loaves in a 9 x 5 loaf pan or four small loaves in those dinky pans. I halved the recipe — and I include the halved version below. My family is three people big. Teens or not, we don’t want to eat the same thing for days.

While I’m all about sharing with the neighbors, my dollhouse oven is not ideal for baking two loaves of bread at a time.

Anyway, with more than 130 recipes, you’ll still have more than enough to go through. A few recipes begin with convenience foods. Let’s skip past those and continue on to the good stuff — the homemade recipes.

Shuffle through the pages of this 9 x 1 x 10.25-inch, 192-page cookbook, and you’ll find a nice variety.

Potatoes Deluxe Casserole, English Apple Casserole, Lemon-Thyme Pound Cake, Sesame Noodles, and Delectable Pumpkin Cheesecake with Chocolate Crust top my list. We do love a good pound cake.

Chapters include: Helping Hands, Secret Garden, Around the World, Neat Freak, Great Outdoors, Holiday.

Who Is Cookbook Author Katie Brown?

I wasn’t familiar with Katie Brown when I grabbed this cookbook a few years ago.

All I saw were a variety of recipes I wanted to make. Yes, there are some craft and home decorating things mixed in, but I’m not sure they’ve aged so well. Basically, this isn’t a straight cookbook. For those of you who enjoy that kind of hands-on creative endeavor, it’s a bonus.

She is (or was) a TV host of “The Katie Brown Workshop” (I haven’t seen or heard of it) and the author of multiple cookbooks (you can find those listed below). Digging in a little, Katie got her start running a catering business out of her Ford Escort. Then she went into the decorating and cafe business (and married a TV executive and producer), which eventually led to TV and cookbooks:

My entire career can be blamed on my red Ford Escort and curry. You see I had a catering company called “Katie’s Foods” (original I know) where I cooked food out of my kitchen and delivered it to clients in my — you guessed it — red Ford Escort.

After a while, my hands, my clothes, and yes, my car began to smell like what I had prepared, what I was about to prepare — it even seemed to reek of what I was thinking of preparing.

And it was always the stench of that particular overbearing, but oh so necessary spice, curry. And believe me, I love that spice, but I couldn’t stand it smelling up my car anymore!

So I decided to find a place where people would come to me to taste my soup du jour. Hence, GOAT was born.

I started GOAT with my good friend Sarah Essex. It was a small vintage boutique in West Hollywood, California. It was filled with fun furniture and tchotchkes, such as over stuffed couches, fifties and sixties’ cocktail wares, homemade bubble baths, and journals.

Customers would take the time to sit and admire the goods in our small six-seat cafe while munching on some of my Aunt Ruth’s cinnamon bread.

Katie Brown, Accessed November 1, 2023.

Aunt Ruth’s cinnamon bread? That’s the same cinnamon swirl quick bread recipe I’m sharing with you below.

About This Cinnamon Quick Bread Recipe

I first made this quick bread recipe on December 14, 2019. Since I write in my cookbooks, I see I gave it 5* then and still do now. It’s unfussy. I don’t have to mess with sour cream, yogurt, or light brown sugar (so it’s a little different than other cinnamon bread recipes).

As a quick bread, it doesn’t use yeast to rise. It takes advantage of the chemical reaction of baking powder and liquid — and definitely takes less time to make than a cinnamon roll or cinnamon streusel.

I combine the cinnamon sugar mixture in a small bowl and set aside. I throw the dry ingredients together: the white sugar (granulated sugar, not powdered sugar), all-purpose flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. I loosely cover it with a pan lid or plastic wrap.

Then, I set out the shortening and the vanilla extract to help streamline my morning prep.

In the morning, I heat the oven before grabbing the wet ingredients. Then, it takes no time at all to cut in the shortening, mix in the eggs and vanilla, and alternate the buttermilk with the flour mixture as you add them to the creamed ingredients.

Note: I’m sure I’ve subbed in milk for the buttermilk in a pinch, but pick up the buttermilk powder if you need something refrigerated shelf stable to get that great tang.

Unlike other quick bread recipes, you aren’t using all of the sugar and cinnamon mixture on the top. You’ll pour half the batter into your greased loaf pan and then throw half the cinnamon and sugar mix over it, top with the rest of the batter, and evenly sprinkle the remaining cinnamon-sugar mixture on the top.

Create the cinnamon sugar swirl with a butter knife and bake — you’ll love the crunchy, hardened cinnamon sugar bread top.

Katie says you can prepare the batter ahead of time and refrigerate it for up to 10 ways. Well, that’s amazing. How did I miss that note?

Other Books by Katie Brown

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