melting your mouth

My mom finally got tired of me stealing borrowing her Cooking Light magazines every time I came over to her house, so she bought me my own subscription a few months back. (Thanks, Mom!) I’m not sure that was the right lesson to teach me, but I’m enjoying the magazine. I’m not so convinced of the “Light” part of many of their recipes, though that’s partly my own fault since I tend to ignore the “reduced-fat” or “fat-free” components to many of their ingredients. But I enjoy the magazine because it gives me new ideas each month and helps keep me out of a rut.

This time, I adapted their recipe for Cardamon-Lime Sweet Rolls into these Lemon Ginger Sweet Rolls. If you believe, as I do, that sweet rolls can only appropriately be eaten fresh for breakfast (unless, of course, there are leftovers), then they do require a bit of advanced planning, since the yeast dough has to rise for a couple hours. But they last just fine ovenight in the fridge after the second rise, and can be popped in the oven the next morning. Makes for a nice twist from the cinnamon rolls from a can we have every now and then (though I’ll admit that, in my opinion, Pillsbury makes a pretty mean sweet roll, too!).

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This month, I joined my first blogging event — The Daring Bakers. This is a group of (mostly) bloggers that all bake the same recipe once a month, and then all post on it the same day. One person sets this “challenge recipe” and everyone has to basically follow the recipe — few modifications are allowed. The idea is to bake outside our comfort zones a bit, but with a supportive group around to learn from and to compare our results. So this month I joined the Daring Bakers and our first recipe was Julia Child’s French Bread, hosted by Breadchick at The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.

Talk about a challenge! I was excited when I found out this month’s challenge would be bread since I haven’t ever made anything but quick bread before and I’d been wanting to try it. But, it was also intimidating. This bread required three different rises, and the shaping was also fairly complicated. (You would think you just roll it into a log to make a baguette, but there’s actually a lot more to it in order to make the bread so that it’ll form a nice crust and gain enough volume and be able to support itself without baking in a pan. Or so I read.) Also, in order to make a simulated “baker’s oven”, I had to find a way to produce steam in the oven. So, all told, a good 6-8 hours to complete, but it was a lot of fun. I was pretty pleased with how the bread looked and tasted. So, if you are feeling ambitious, I recommend this bread, but I will admit I probably won’t make a habit of making this every weekend.

Thanks again to Sara and Breadchick for coming up with a great the challenge this month, and check out my fellow Daring Bakers’ posts from the Daring Bakers Blogroll.

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This is another recipe I’ve gotten from my grandmother Meme through my mom. It’s not originally her recipe, but comes from a church cookbook from Friedland, a small Moravian town outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The original recipe calls it a “Golden Corncake,” but I’ve always called it cornbread. Like my mom and my grandmother, I always make my cornbread in an iron skillet. We melt the butter in the skillet first, so the skillet’s hot when you add the batter and it gets a nice buttery crust.

I usually accompany cornbread with some kind of stewy, stick-to-your-bones kind of food, like chili, or in this case Jambalaya (thanks for the country ham, Mom!). It’s pretty good left over, but it’s definitely best hot out of the pan. I like to smear it with a little butter, and Matt’s taught me to make that honey butter, which is also a pretty good treat.

Cornbread

Ingredients:

3/4 c Corn meal (yellow)
1 c Flour
1/3 c Sugar
3 t Baking powder
3/4 t Salt
1 c Milk
1 Egg, well-beaten
2 T Margarine

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 F. Mix and sift dry ingredients. Heat skillet in the oven and melt margarine in it. Add the melted margarine, milk, and egg to the dry ingredients. Pour into skillet. Bake for 20 minutes at 425 F, until golden and a little browned around the edges.