My new favorite Cornbread recipe

I tend to bake late at night, I'm not sure why, I just do. So last night, around 11:30pm, I decided to whip up a new recipe I had found on allrecipes.com for Cornbread.

Who doesn't like cornbread? I've always made the super easy, somewhat healthy recipe on the package of cornmeal. It uses just a little oil, you can make it with one egg and one egg white, not too much sugar, it's great! But cornbread was on my mind recently, yes with Thanksgiving coming up, but I was also delightfully surprised when I went to dinner at a little cafe recently to be given a deliciously yummy and BUTTERY piece of cornbread while waiting for our meal. What a great idea! And way better than the typical bread basket. So I was craving a more buttery unhealthy cornbread recipe and came across this one below. It's not overly buttery either, but in my opinion, it's kind of perfect, and a recipe I'll be holding onto for a while. The best part? You can make it at 11:30pm and it will be done by 11:30pm. . . of course daylight savings time helps.

Grandmother's Buttermilk Cornbread

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk (duh, I didn't have buttermilk. . . let 1 cup of milk with 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice sit for ten minutes and there you go -- a tip I learned from Jenni!)
  
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease an 8 inch square pan.
2. Melt butter in large skillet.* Remove from heat and stir in sugar. Quickly add eggs and beat until well blended. Combine buttermilk with baking soda and stir into mixture in pan. Stir in cornmeal, flour, and salt until well blended and few lumps remain. Pour batter into the prepared pan.
3. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.**

* I used my 3 quart saucepan, which was big enough to later mix everything else into, and didn't have to dirty a bowl.
** It will only take 30 minutes unless you use part or all whole wheat flour instead of the all-purpose, but why would you do that? Need I remind you that there's already a stick of butter in there?

Gifted

A friend of mine has a birthday coming up, and this can't come at a better time because, 1.) this blog needs something new and 2.) my stress levels have reached a dangerous high that perhaps even baking for others can't overcome. But, try I will. I have a vision, but for top-birthday-secrecy, I will not publish said vision here until it's all done.

Last night was baking night, and let me tell you, I needed it. For this particular cake I was using a brand new (...er, old) recipe. My BirthdayFriend recently lost his grandmother, and when he was home with family after her passing he was thoughtful enough to bring back an old baking cookbook for me. I decided that I would make one of those recipes for this cake! BirthdayFriend requested chocolate, so off I went. I settled on one entitled Sweet Chocolate Cake. (As a side note, this cookbook has some really strange recipes that I'm totally interested to try - a sauerkraut cake?! Really?!) The Sweet Chocolate Cake recipe was interesting because the author noted that she liked using brown sugar. The recipe said it would fill 3 8-inch rounds, which seemed ok because, for the cake in my mind, I needed 2 8-inch rounds and a little something left over. I would need to use my spherical ball cake pan for the left over - as I needed something spherical to add to the cake.

Sweet Chocolate Cake
4 oz. sweet baking chocolate
1/2 cup boiling water
1 cup butter
2 cups white or brown sugar*
4 eggs, separated
1 tsp. vanilla
2 1/2 cups of cake flour, sifted
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup buttermilk**
(all ingredients at room temp, except for the boiling water...which is, of course, boiling)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and grease and flour 3 8-inch round pans. Melt the chocolate in the boiling water, and set aside to cool. Cream the butter, and gradually add the sugar. Add in the egg yolks and vanilla, and combine until smooth. Carefully add the cooled chocolate, and mix until well combined. Add in the sifted dry ingredients and the buttermilk in alternating batches, starting and ending with the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly. Stiffly beat the egg whites and fold into the batter. Pour into pans, about 3/4 full. Bake for 35-40 minutes.

*I used one cup of each, the author was excited about the brown, but I was nervous about 2 cups of it!
**for which I used dried buttermilk (Saco brand, thanks LeahPants!)

I was excited, more than just to be baking again, because I could use something else I was given for Christmas. My mom gave me Wilton Bake Even strips, that make the cakes bake even so you don't have to level them. I have NO IDEA how they work. You first saturate them in water, then you wrap it around the outside of the pan, with the aluminum looking side facing out. You pin it closed, and just bake as normal. I was so excited to try these, it matches the first time I ever used the mechanical pastry bag (and you know how well that turned out!)

It was about here that I got carried away with my new baking gear (see, it HAS been a while since I've baked!!) Also for Christmas, my dad had given me these teeny tiny mini pans. Two tube pans and a springform. Adorable. So with the batter left over from filling my two 8-inch rounds, complete with Bake Even strips, I filled the mini pans from my dad.

It all went into the oven for 30 minutes. And then I realized. The SPHERICAL PAN! I had forgotten. In the glory of using all of my new gifts I had lost sight of the task at hand - BirthdayFriend's cake. So, later this week I will be "sculpting" spherical forms from the mini tube pan cakes!

When the cakes were done I was amazed, they were indeed level. I will not need to trim them - which is fabulous, because I am awful at that part. And, I ate some from the springform pan, it was good. The brown sugar was a good idea, although, I'm not sure I'd have done the full 2 cups.

The cakes are now carefully wrapped and in the freezer, waiting for decorating day!

not for T-day

I figure the next couple of posts will revolve around T'giving, I know I've got some Roulade and Stuffing miracles to come.  I figured that I'd get things going again with a non-Thanksgiving post.

I made oatmeal craisin pancakes tonight.  And unfortunately, they were just alright.  They were missing something, I'm not sure what.  I think it might have had to do with the mixing of the "wet" ingredients.  I was supposed to melt butter, and add buttermilk (I used the milk + vinegar substitution), vanilla, and an egg.  Maybe I didn't let the "buttermilk" stand long enough, or maybe the milk was too cold and the butter was too warm, but when I mixed it all together it was...odd.  Not uniform.  I was in a rush, it was about 830pm, and had been about 12 hours since I'd last eaten and I was getting desperate.  I dumped it into the dry ingredients, and whisked it up.  Seemed to mix up fine.  But something was just a little off when I ate them.  Disappointing.