Cheese & Chive Bread for French Fridays with Dorie

I love a good savory quick bread. It's the perfect solution for those times when you must have bread, only you forgot or didn't have time to get started early enough to make a yeasted loaf.  So I was happy to see this cheese and chive bread on the list for this week's French Fridays with Dorie.

Breadhead that I am, however, when I read the recipe I had a feeling that the ingredients were going to need a bit of a boost. In my experience, savory breads like this tend to suck up flavor like a sponge, and so they need a little extra help. Now, I can't say for sure that the bread would have been on the bland side as written, but I can tell you that mine came out quite nicely.

I tripled the cheese, and used a combination of shredded and cubed Gruyere, Comte, and Emmenthal, doubled the chives and toasted walnuts, and used a heaping tsp of both salt and white pepper. All this weighed the loaf down a bit, but it was worth it. The results were anything but bland, and it made the perfect accompaniment to some of my homemade rosemary and garlic tomato soup.

More importantly ... it's pretty!

I am seriously trying to figure out if it's at all possible to cook  an entire year's worth of blog posts at once so that I can photograph them at around 3 pm in the early spring light.  I want to bottle this light.

You know the drill: If you'd like to join in on all the fun, just pick up a copy of Around My French Table and start cooking along, and check out what everyone else thought about this recipe here. Happy French Friday!