18 Sweet Bread Recipes to Make at Home

From fruit-filled loaves to sweet-and-savory baked treats, some of the best bread recipes to make at home are on the sweeter side. Make any of these easy recipes for brunch, dinner, or a sweet-tooth-satisfying snack.

1. 1. Banana bread: Home cooks typically make this moist, no-knead quick bread in a loaf pan with overripe bananas. This cake-like dessert became popular in the 1930s, alongside the emergence of baking soda and baking powder. Banana bread is now one of the most popular easy sweet breads that cooks of all levels can prepare with a handful of pantry-staple ingredients.
2. 2. Chocolate zucchini bread: This extra-sweet spin on the classic sweet vegetable bread calls for grated zucchini, cocoa, and chocolate chips. Shredded zucchini adds moisture to chocolate zucchini bread, yielding a fudgy texture similar to a chocolate cake. It’s the perfect way to sneak veggies into your dessert, or use up an excess of garden produce from the summer season.
3. 3. Cranberry bread: This sweet loaf recipe calls for fresh (or frozen) cranberries, flour, sugar, eggs, and a liquid, like buttermilk. Serve cranberry bread at breakfast with a smear of cream cheese or mascarpone and sliced pecans. Alternatively, drizzle icing over the loaf and serve it for dessert.
4. 4. Date nut bread: Like some other quick breads, this dark, moist bread gets its rise from baking soda or baking powder rather than yeast. In the 1930s, it became popular to buy date nut bread in cans and serve it with cream cheese topping.
   
5. 5. Fig bread: This quick bread consists of fresh figs, flour, sugar, eggs, and a liquid, like buttermilk. Serve fig bread at breakfast with a swipe of cream cheese or sweet yogurt, or drizzle icing over the loaf and serve it for dessert.
6. 6. Hot cross buns: These sweet buns filled with dried fruit get their name from the cross of icing, dough, or knife scoring that adorns their tops. Diners enjoy hot cross buns sliced in half and topped with butter.
7. 7. Irish soda bread: Make this traditional Irish bread with flour, baking soda, salt, and sour milk or buttermilk. This bread includes a leavener of baking soda, unlike yeast breads that use dry yeast or fermented bread starters. The American version of soda bread is a white, subtly sweet, almost cake-like bread made with all-purpose flour.
8. 8. Italian Easter bread: Home cooks make Italian Easter bread by twisting anise-flavored brioche dough into a wreath shape, decorating it with dyed eggs, and baking until golden brown. Known in Italy as pane di Pasqua, this semi-sweet egg bread is a classic Easter centerpiece.
9. 9. Japanese milk bread: Also called shokupan and Hokkaido milk bread, this semi-sweet fluffy, yeasted white bread gets its tender texture from a technique called tangzhong. The tangzhong is a water roux that involves heating flour, whole milk, and water to make a slurry. This technique allows the flour to absorb more liquid, yielding moist Japanese milk bread. Use this baked good to make sandwich bread, buns, and cinnamon rolls.
10. 10. Korean fish bread (Bungeoppang): Bungeoppang (“carp bread”) is a Korean fish-shaped pastry. Vendors sell bungeoppang at food stalls and outdoor markets throughout Korea, but you can recreate it at home with a fish-shaped mold and a few simple pantry ingredients. The most common bungeoppang filling is sweet red bean paste, made from sweetened azuki beans. Other popular fillings include sweet potato, chocolate hazelnut spread, and sweet custard.
11. 11. Lemon blueberry bread: This sweet bread features a lemon glaze topping and chunks of fresh blueberries. Somewhere in between a quick bread and a pound cake, lemon blueberry loaf is the perfect baked good to serve with brunch or afternoon coffee.
12. 12. Morning buns: The perfect cross between a croissant and cinnamon bread, morning buns feature laminated pastry dough that puffs up during baking, resulting in flaky and buttery layers. Home cooks fill the rolls with a cinnamon-sugar-orange zest mixture. Finish off the pastry with a dusting of extra cinnamon and sanding sugar straight out of the oven.
13. 13. Orange bread: Fresh orange juice, zest, and orange extract flavor this tangy citrus bread. Recipes for orange bread may also include milk, butter, eggs, or olive oil as the primary sources of fat and structure.
14. 14. Persimmon bread: This seasonal sweet loaf consists of flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and persimmon pulp. Recipes for persimmon bread may also include warm spices like allspice, clove, cinnamon, aromatic liquor like whiskey or apple brandy, chopped nuts, and dried fruit. The recipe calls for chemical leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda for its rise and does not require kneading.
15. 15. Pumpkin bread: Pumpkin purée and warm baking spices flavor this dense, fall-friendly sweet bread. Pumpkin bread involves minimal prep time to make a basic batter that lends itself well to additional formats, like pumpkin muffins or mini loaves. Use slices of this sweet baked treat to make crispy French toast or bread pudding.
16. 16. Sugar bread: Home cooks flavor this sweet bread with brown sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Recipes for sugar bread may also include milk, unsalted butter, eggs, or olive oil as the primary source of fat, which provides structure.
17. 17. Vegan banana bread: Vegan banana bread does not contain animal products like eggs or dairy. Instead, this sweet treat achieves a rich, moist crumb texture from ingredients like vegetable and coconut oil, vegan butter, and non-dairy milk. Standard toppings for vegan banana bread include peanut butter, a drizzle of vegan dark chocolate, and sliced almonds.
18. 18. Zucchini bread: This simple quick bread recipe calls for zucchini, flour, sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract, giving it a mild flavor that cooks can adjust for sweet or savory palates. Enjoy zucchini bread for breakfast with a cup of coffee or tea or as a dessert with a dollop of whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Chocolate chips, dried cranberries, and chopped nuts are among the most popular additions to the recipe.

We’ve got you covered. All you knead (see what we did there?) is The MasterClass Annual Membership, some water, flour, salt, and yeast, and our exclusive lessons from Apollonia Poilâne—Paris’s premier bread maker and one of the earliest architects of the artisanal bread movement. Roll up your sleeves and get baking.