Cranberry orange bread

To be fair, this was originally a cranberry walnut bread, but since I don't really like nuts in breads, we decided to omit those and just go with cranberry orange.  The cranberries just recently showed up at our local Kroger, unless they showed up while I was on vacation...in which case then no, that wasn't so recently that they showed up.

Anyway, our notes:

• Of course, we omitted the walnuts, partly because I don't like using nuts in bread, but also for a reason explained below.
• The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar.  If you know us at all, then you know that we don't like too much sugar in our recipes.  We used something less than 1 cup and the end result turned out fine; one could probably use about 3/4 cup of sugar and it would still turn out fine.
• I have no idea how much orange zest I actually used.  Since I wasn't about to zest the orange and then determine how close to 1 Tbsp. I was, I just figured that the zest of 1 orange was sufficient.  The end result didn't seem to suffer from any lack of orange zest.
• Perhaps because of the layout of the back of the bag of cranberries (where I got the recipe), I somehow missed that I was to have "coarsely chopped" the cranberries before tossing them into the batter.  This didn't seem to adversely affect things, though it probably would have turned out marginally better had the berries been chopped.
• Also speaking of the cranberries, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of them.  Somehow I assumed that this was the entire package, so not only were they not chopped, there were also way more of them than the recipe had said to use.  Oops.  Only after I'd dumped all of the cranberries into the batter did I notice that the serving size for the package was a 1/2 cup, and that there were 6 servings in the bag.  So apparently I was to have used only half the bag.  But then I realized that it wouldn't have been as easy to use the leftover half of the bag (all the other recipes on the bag used the entire thing), and since the final product was tasty, we figured that this wasn't a bad thing to have thrown all of the cranberries into the batter.  This was a contributing factor in the decision not to use walnuts; there was barely enough room in the bowl for all of those cranberries, so we figured that the batter wouldn't also be able to hold chopped walnuts.

This was definitely a recipe to keep, especially with our modifications.  I'd like to say that next time I'll probably make at least some effort at chopping those cranberries, but most likely I'll chop one or two handfuls, call it good, and then throw the rest in whole.

Whole cranberries.