This Braided Blue Bread is a super fun recipe that will make your next breakfast the happiest meal! It’s a fluffy milk cake made with butterfly pea flower, a beautiful blue flower native to Asia. Deliciously spongy, exotic and colorful – what’s not to love about this bread? So, let’s do it together!
Butterfly pea flower, or blue pea for short, is a bright blue flower native to Southeast Asia. Rich in blue-purple pigments, it has a delicately sweet and floral flavor with subtle earthy notes.
The dried flowers are traditionally brewed into a soothing blue tea. They are also a natural food coloring for rice, pasta, beverages and even jellies, cakes and other desserts.
And yes, you can use blue peas to make blue bread too!
For this recipe you will need all the classic bread ingredients – flour, salt, warm water and yeast; plus powdered Butterfly Pea flowers for color.
We also used oil and coconut milk to achieve this fluffy, tender crumb that makes milk bread so good! But because there’s no cow’s milk or butter, this recipe is total dairy free and veganwhich is a nice plus!
As for that powdered butterfly pea flowersYou can find them online or in health food stores, sometimes referred to as “blue matcha” powder.
The powder is made by pulverizing the dried petals of blue pea flowers. It is much more concentrated with blue pigments than the plain dried flowers. So it’s perfect for recipes where you need to achieve a deep blue hue, like this blue sponge cake and of course, this blue bread.
If you want to keep it nice and simple, you can knead all the ingredients together into a blue dough and make the whole loaf blue.
Or you can divide the dough in half and make one two-tone braided bread, like us. It’s super easy – and it will look super pretty! So, follow us and we’ll show you how!
And if you’re looking for more fun bread recipes, check out this purple bread with ube butter, banana bread with mochi flour, or vegan pumpkin babka loaf. They are all incredibly delicious!