Cranberry Orange Mini Bread Loaves
Looking for a wonderful gift to make your neighbors or friends this Christmas? These Cranberry Orange Mini Bread Loaves are festive and delicious so they are sure to please!
Cranberry Orange Mini Bread Loaves
If there’s one thing I love it’s giving baked goods as gifts. Whether it’s for Christmas or Birthdays or just any day that needs to be celebrated. I’m a giver and a baker, so this recipe for Orange Cranberry Mini Loaves is perfect for me. It’s a big batch too which is nice, just make one recipe and you’ll have several gifts to give. And they don’t require any fancy ingredients to make. Make a batch of Cranberry Orange Mini Loaves for gift giving and your friends will love you for it.
Baking for friends goes way back for me, I used to make everyone I knew a cake in my easy bake oven when I was a little girl. From scratch, little tiny cakes, frosted even and usually with a sweet little theme to go with it, like a cat face or penguins on a frosting iceberg over blue frosting. Needless to say, this trait has followed me in my adult life, some things never change. Although I have to admit I don’t bake a lot of cakes for friends anymore, I just don’t have the time, but these little mini loaves are something I do make time for.
–Looking for more easy bread recipes? Here are 18 Absolutely Delightful Quick Sweet Bread Recipes.
I use dried cranberries in this recipe because they’re something I always have tucked away in my pantry. My kids love them, especially on oatmeal or in cookies or even just in their lunches. The other thing you need is sour milk. You can obviously use buttermilk but I find just adding lemon juice (or vinegar!) to milk works just as well and it doesn’t make a difference in the flavor. See? No fancy ingredients to worry about just fairly basic staples.
–Learn more about How to Make Buttermilk and find more Recipes That Use Buttermilk.
Let’s bake!
Cranberry Orange Mini Bread Loaves
Streusel Topping:
- 1/2 cup flour
- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- 6 Tablespoons of cold butter
- 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
Mix the flour, sugar and cinnamon together cut in the butter with two knives or rub it in with your hands until the mixture is well combined but crumbly, set aside.
Bread Recipe:
- 1 1/2 cups dried cranberries
- 1 orange
- 4 cups flour
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 2 cups buttermilk or juice of half a lemon and enough milk to make 2 cups
- 2/3 cup of oil, I used light olive oil
Preheat the oven to 350˚ and grease 6 mini loaf baking pans.
Put the cranberries in a small saucepan, zest the orange and add it to the pan then juice the same orange and pour the juice over the cranberries. Warm gently over low heat, you don’t want to boil this, you’re just softening up the cranberries and infusing them with orange flavor.
While the cranberries are cooking, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda together. In a separate bowl mix the eggs, sugars, oil, and buttermilk.
Stir in the soaked cranberries (do not drain) until just combined. Pour into prepared pans. Divide the streusel evenly over the tops.
Bake for 35-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool, wrap and give to friends!
–If you are looking for more mini loaf pan recipes to share with friends this year, you might also want to try this yummy Chocolate Cream Cheese Bread.
Print this Cranberry Orange Mini Loaves Recipe to add to your Recipe Binder below:
Orange Cranberry Mini Loaves
Ingredients
Streusel Topping:
- 1/2 cup flour
- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- 6 Tablespoons of cold butter
- 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
Bread Recipe:
- 1 1/2 cups dried cranberries
- 1 orange
- 4 cups flour
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 2 cups buttermilk or juice of half a lemon and enough milk to make 2 cups
- 2/3 cup of oil I used light olive oil
Instructions
Streusel Topping:
-
Mix the flour, sugar, and cinnamon together cut in the butter with two knives or rub it in with your hands until the mixture is well combined but crumbly, set aside.
Bread:
-
Preheat the oven to 350˚ and grease 6 mini loaf baking pans.
-
Put the cranberries in a small saucepan, zest the orange and add it to the pan then juice the same orange and pour the juice over the cranberries. Warm gently over low heat, you don't want to boil this, you're just softening up the cranberries and infusing them with orange flavor.
-
While the cranberries are cooking, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda together. In a separate bowl mix the eggs, sugars, oil, and buttermilk.
-
Stir in the soaked cranberries (do not drain) until just combined. Pour into prepared pans. Divide the streusel evenly over the tops.
-
Bake for 35-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool, wrap and give to friends!
Here are a few other homemade gift ideas you might enjoy:
Sugar Cookies in a Jar: Gift Idea
Homemade Oatmeal Cookie Mix Recipe
Lemon Poppyseed Bread Mix Recipe
Find more Simple Homemade Gift ideas on Little House Living.
Do you like to give baked goods as gifts? What’s your favorite recipe to share?
Laura Sampson, a lifelong Alaskan, is the writer of Little House Big Alaska, an Alaska lifestyle blog. She’s a mom to three boys and attributes every gray hair and wrinkle to them. Laura shares her farmhouse with her husband, 2 dogs and 2 cats, the obligatory flock of chickens inhabit their own coop out back. She’s been blogging for 9 years and enjoys living the writer and social media influencer’s life.
This Cranberry Orange Mini Loaves Recipe was originally published on Little House Living in December 2017. It has been updated as of December 2019.
Hello, these look delicious! Please, what is the amount of cinnamon in the streusel topping?
Thank you!
Whoops, we forgot to add that in there! It’s fixed now 🙂 There is 1 teaspoon of cinnamon in the topping.
These look delicious, and would make a great gift! You should put together a cookbook ?
It looks really delicious ! How long can we keep this cake ?
These look amazing! I can’t wait to try this recipe! Blessings, Jamie
Hi, is this something I could freeze?
Yes. Just wrap it well in plastic wrap/freezer paper or a large zippered bag after baking and freeze. Breads are usually good for up to 3 months in the freezer.
Great! Thank you! Making it this weekend. 🙂
I got mini loaf pans for Christmas! Can’t wait to make this recipe. Visiting from the Celebrate It! link party.
Oh my goodness these sound so delicious and I can just imagine how heavenly the house must smell while they’re baking. Can’t wait to try them
This looks wonderful. Cranberry-Orange is one of my favorite combinations of flavor.
Amalia
xo
These look so good. I pinned it.
This looks amazing! I always have craisins in the pantry and I’m always looking for recipes that use them. Pinned.
I love the Cranberry Orange combination of flavor for your bread, it looks delicious! Happy to see you here at Full Plate Thursday and thanks so much for sharing with us.
Miz Helen
I love cranberry orange bread and this looks so good with the streusel topping. Yum! Pinning!
I want it all! Looks soooo good!
Theses little loaves look delish. Thank you for sharing at Snickerdoodle.
Made them today as large muffins. No large cupcake pan so winged it by stacking two large wide mouth canning rings/one on top of the other. Worked great. Added chopped pecans. Didn’t have milk so used 2 cups of my homemade kefir. Yield 12 muffins with enough dough left to make a microwave cake in a greased cup(nuked it for two minutes.). Will make them again. Think I will see what happens if I use 3 eggs. Thank you very much for the lovely recipe —the orange/cranberry combo is splendid
Well you must know these little prizes are absolutely delicious—-but they are addictive! Made batter into 12 jumbo size muffins. Enough leftover to make one serving of a microwave cup cake . Substituted 2 cups of my homemade kefir for the buttermilk and added 1 cup chopped pecans. Didn’t have jumbo muffin pan. So stacked 12 sets of two— wide mouth canning rings on my 12/17 inch jelly roll pan. One on top of the other (24 rings). Then placed cupcake papers inside the openings to support the sides of the papers and filled them with batter. Nice!! Muffins held their shape—no sprawling or overflow of batter to baking pan. Betcha you can’t eat just one!
Can’t wait to make these mini loaves!!! I am so wanting one now and can ‘t wait to share the others. Could you please tell me what size mini load pans I should use? Also, how much to fill each pan and for how long to cook? Looking forward to the tightness ☺
This recipe just uses standard mini size loaf pans. The directions for filling and cooking are in the article above.
Do you think I could use fresh cranberries?
You can but it will leave large holes in the bread when they cook down.
I made these last night, following the directions exactly. The flavor was good, but the streusel sunk down into the rather thin batter and did not stay on top as pictured. I wonder what is the correct measurement of flour. On the Pinterest post, it says 4 and 1/2 cups but in the actual recipe it says 4 cups. If I ever make this bread again, I will put in the extra flour plus add more cranberries. Bread was good, just needs some tweaking.
Exactly how big are the “mini” loaf pans? I have different sizes of mini loaf pans, so just want to make sure I’m using the correct size, for the cook time listed. Thanks!
To me it looks like she used a standard mini loaf pan which is about 5 1/2×3 inches.
I just made this today . i got 8 mini loaves out of this recipe .. I used “5 5/8×3 3/16 x 1 15/16″loaf pan brought a 5 pkg at Walmart.. Used 2/3 c. full in each pan with left over batter add to each pan till its gone .