Cranberry Celebration Bread

After my last run-in with a braided loaf of bread, I wanted to make another, hopefully more beautiful than the last. I decided to try the Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Loaf from "The Breadbaker's Apprentice:"

I was a little low on cranberries and am not a huge walnut fan, so after checking my stores of fruits and nuts, I decided to use cranberries, apricots and pecans:

The dough for this loaf is very similar to challah - it is enriched with eggs and a bit of sugar. You can see that I spread plenty of flour on my counter as the dough looked a bit sticky to me before I even started kneading:

Once the dough was kneaded it took a bit more work to distribute all of the chopped nuts and fruit:

I worked it all in and let it rise, and then split the dough for the two braids:

Here are the two braids before I combined them into one loaf and let them rise for baking:

And fresh out of the oven!