Vanilla Spice Bread

1. Place water, milk, vanilla extract, brown sugar, white sugar, cardamom, coriander, vegetable oil, and salt into the pan of a bread machine in that order. Pour the flour onto the other ingredients, and sprinkle the flour with yeast. Set the bread machine to the Dough cycle; turn on the machine.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9x5-inch bread pan.

3. When the Dough cycle is completed, remove the dough from the machine, punch down if necessary, form into a loaf, and place into the prepared bread pan with the seam side down. Cover and let rise until doubled, 20 to 30 minutes.

4. Bake in the preheated oven until the loaf is golden brown, 35 to 45 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes before removing to finish cooling on a rack.

Cook's Notes

We've been making a lot of this since I first invented it about a year ago. We experimented a lot with multiple parameters and we found the following to be very important:

Use DARK brown sugar. Light brown sugar isn't as good.

You can use oil or butter, but there's no discernible difference and since oil is cheaper, we use oil.

High-gluten flour makes for a more satisfying loaf, but you can use normal flour. Or add a little extra gluten yourself.

Finally, for a softer loaf replace all the water with milk (for a final milk volume of 1 1/4 cup milk).