quick bread

Honey Butter Cornbread

May 16, 2018

I don’t know about you, but as a kid I loved cornbread! My mom and I would make cornbread maybe once a week (okay, maybe not that often) from the Marie Calendar cornbread mix. It was our go-to!

Lately, I haven’t been eating as much cornbread, but sometimes the meal (and mood) just calls for it! Particularly when I make our favorite turkey chili. How can you have chili without cornbread!? You really can’t.

So I went about trying to replicate my old favorite, with a few tweaks. For instance, I swapped the sugar for honey because honey and cornbread are a match made in heaven. The honey gives the cornbread so much more flavor and depth. Not to mention, it cuts out the processed sugar. Win-win.

I also added in some frozen corn kernels (specifically, roasted corn kernels from Trader Joes, just because that’s what I had on hand). This ingredient is totally optional, but I love the little bits of corn in the cornbread which add a little bit of extra moisture to an otherwise dry bread.

The coup de gras is the little bits of butter that baked right on top of the cornbread to give it this extra crunchy and delicious crust on top. Hense why I call this honey butter cornbread.

This honey butter cornbread was so good I was eating leftovers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Top it with a little more butter (or better yet, honey butter), and you won’t even need the chili!

How to Make It

Cornbread is actually a pretty simple recipe and easy to make from scratch, provided you have everything on hand. Like other quick breads, it’s as simple as mixing together the dry ingredients, then pouring in the wet ingredients.

In this case, first mix together the cornmeal, flour, salt, and baking powder.

In a separate bowl or cup, mix together the wet ingredients: milk, honey, melted butter, and egg.

Then mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.

Mix until all the ingredients are just combined.

Then, if you so choose, mix in the frozen corn kernels. I used roasted corn kernels because that’s what I had available, but roasted corn is not necessary.

Finally, pour the batter into an 8″-9″ square or round pan, pressing the thick batter all the way to the edges to ensure an even bake.

And for the butter piece of the honey butter cornbread, top the entire pan with little pieces of butter. As the bread bakes, the butter melts right into the top forming a crunchy, buttery top which is oh so good!

Once out of the oven, you will have to restrain yourself from digging right in! But I insist on letting it cool down a little otherwise the bread will just crumble to pieces.

Like this. Because I couldn’t help myself and just cut right into a slice.

It was still delicious though!

Supplies and Recipe

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Maple Pecan Pumpkin Bread

October 10, 2017

I know everyone is a little pumpkin obsessed these days (present company included), but there is one Fall flavor combination that I think I prefer even more: maple pecan! Even Starbucks is getting on the bandwagon with their maple-pecan latte, which is delicious, btw.

Last Fall I made this maple pecan cake which may just be my favorite cake of all time (it tastes like a giant stack of pancakes). So, this Fall I couldn’t wait to get the gang back together and make some more delicious maple pecan treats. Since it is October after all, I couldn’t leave pumpkin completely out of the mix. Hence, we have maple pecan pumpkin bread!

This recipe is very similar to my glazed pumpkin bread recipe. The only changes I made were to replace some of the sugar with maple syrup to give the bread a subtly sweet maple flavor; it also makes the bread extra moist!

To start, cream together butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup for about a minute, then add in the eggs and pumpkin and mix until the are incorporated. Move that bowl aside and whisk together the flour (in this case I used both AP and whole wheat flour), baking powder, baking soda, and pumpkin spice just until there are no lumps or clumps. Then mix half of the flour mixture into the butter mixture.

The other half of the flour mixture will actually be tossed with the chopped pecans before being mixed in with the rest of the batter. This helps keep the pecans evenly disbursed throughout the bread.

Then, pour the batter into a loaf pan and sprinkle a few extra pecans right on top. Finally, bake the loaf at 350 degrees for almost an hour. Just sit back, clean some dishes, and wait for your kitchen to fill up with the most wonderful maple, pecan, pumpkin spice scent. Seriously, someone should bottle that scent and make it into a candle!

The hardest part of most recipes (for me, at least), is waiting for the baked goods to cool before I dig in. Since this pumpkin bread takes almost an hour to bake, by the time it comes out of the oven the anticipation is killing me. Oh, and the smell. Have I mentioned how good it smells? (Seriously, someone make this a candle! I will buy your first 20.) Yeah, that won’t help either.

But I encourage you to wait as long as possible before slicing into this amazing loaf. It will take at least 20 minutes for it to cool enough to cut into without crumbling into pieces.

The wait will be worth it.

Promise.
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Glazed Pumpkin Bread

October 5, 2016

I started a new job on Monday. While I am still at the same company, I am in a whole new department on an entirely different floor. While I am excited about this new job, it was really hard to leave all my friends in my old department. I would like to say that my coworkers were sad to see me go, too, but I think they are really going to miss all the baked goods I bring in. Actually, I don’t have to assume…many people down right told me that they expected me to still drop off cookies and muffins.

So on my last day in the group, I decided to wake up a bit early and make them one last treat – pumpkin bread. And if you are wondering why there are no pictures of the process, it’s because this was thrown together before the sun came up.

Whipping up the batter for this quick bread was really easy and, well, quick. But it does take some time to bake. Which was fine for me. I put it in the oven then I went on upstairs and got ready for work. It actually worked out really well. It also helped that since it was my last day in the job, I wasn’t too worried about being late.

But because of the time crunch, I didn’t really have a chance to test this out before I brought it into the office. Sure, I licked the bowl and the batter was delish, but of course things could have changed in the oven. Once it was dropped off in the break room, I waited for someone else to cut in so that I could finally steal a bit. Fortunately, it was good….it was really good. That pumpkin bread was gone within the hour.

I’m going to miss my old coworkers. They were such good recipe taste testers and barometers, and they didn’t even know it! I always knew I had a good recipe if the food was I brought was gone by lunch or someone asked for the recipe. I guess I will have to keep dropping off some baked goods for them.

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

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