Apple Walnut Cream Cheese Quick Bread

Since I've been on bed rest/house arrest, I've either ordered our groceries online for delivery or sent Ryan out to pick up a few things between big orders. As a result, we ended up with some red apples which I'm not really a big fan of as well as some light cream cheese that I didn't order but ended up in our fridge when we received an accidental extra bag of groceries a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to do something with the apples this week so they wouldn't go to waste, and for some reason, I was drawn to the cream cheese as a compliment... Blame the pregnancy! After some searching, I came across a recipe for apple cream cheese bread on this blog: TomatoKumato. It looked good, but I thought I could make it even more tasty and I did! This bread is delightful!

So, here's my recipe for Apple Walnut Cream Cheese Quick Bread.

Ingredients for the bread:
2 red apples, grated with the peel on (use the large grate or you end up with apple juice)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/3 cup flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Ingredients for the swirl:
6 oz. softened light cream cheese
1 cup chopped, toasted, walnuts
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350. Grease/butter/spray a loaf pan and set aside.

Combine grated apple, oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a large bowl. Add to the bowl, but don't mix in, the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg. Gently fold in the dry ingredients. Pour the mix into the loaf pan.

In a small bowl, combine cream cheese, walnuts, sugar, and egg. Pour on top of the batter in the loaf pan and swirl into batter with a knife.

Cover the top of the pan with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 30 minutes. The bread is done when a toothpick is inserted into the middle of the bread and comes out clean and the top should appear a liitle crisp.

The cream cheese makes it really moist, so you may need to bake it a bit longer than expected depending on the size of your pan and the efficiency of your oven. My oven, for example, is horrible when it comes to breads, so it took about an hour and twenty minutes altogether.