Beet Bread

Have way too many of these beauties lying around the house?  Yup!  Me too. 

My creativity has been exhausted, and I'm just not digging the beet chocolate milk anymore.  The sauteed beets?  Oh yes, they were good.  The beet smoothies?  Bring it on!  But seriously, my garden is on power mode and is producing like mad.  I had to get creative with these things.  So...

Beet bread!  (John suggested I put something else in the picture to correctly convey the enormous size of this loaf...thus, a garden tomato in the background.  Yes, it's supposed to be green.)

Now, to be fair, this huge red boule of goodness is NOT from my Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day book.  Nope.  This beast took up a good four hours of my life.  But oh, was it worth it.  (I did read somewhere that the authors of my five minute bread book have another book that includes beet bread, but this recipe is not from them.  Bummer.  Beet bread in five minutes is quite appealing to me!)

I altered the recipe by cooking the beets first, instead of using only raw beets.  I pureed them in my food processor, then added them to the flour mixture. 

How pretty!  Watch out though, as the mixture does stain a bit.

 This is the dough after rising a couple of hours.  It popped the lid off my container!

My final product! 

The true test...do the littles like it?  Abby was thrilled to be eating pink bread, and William wanted more!  I'd say this bread was a success!