Perfect Sweet Cornbread

I don't know about you, but I think that people have a reallllyyyyy weird thing with cornbread.  I lived in Texas for a while, and it seems that the South as a whole would be shocked and appalled at a sweet cornbread.  Their cornbread is crumbly and savory.  Hey, I like that too ... but there's something about cornbread that's moist with just a touch of sugar that gets me excited.

That's the saddest realization I've ever come to on this blog.

Anyway .. say what you will, this cornbread is really delicious.  Put away your Jiffy mix, and get out the butter and honey.

You'll need.... (this is for a TON of cornbread, like a 9x13 pan full)

1 cup of yellow cornmeal

3 cups of all purpose flour

1 1/3 cups of sugar

2 Tablespoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

3/4 cups of vegetable oil

1/3 cup of melted butter

2 tablespoons of honey

4 eggs, beaten (be gentle)

2 1/2 cups of whole milk

Optional: some diced pickled jalapenos or a can of green chilies would be great in this.  You can also add some cheddar or Monterrey jack cheese ... lots of tasty options.  

Alrighty, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and grease a 9 x 13 inch baking pan.  

In a large mixing bowl, put in your flour, salt, sugar, cornmeal, and baking powder.  

Mix until just combined.

In a separate bowl, add your eggs, vegetable oil, melted butter, honey, and milk.  Whisk together. 

Add the egg mixture to your batter, and stir until just combined.

That's it for the batter!  At this point I would add in any cheese or peppers if you want to spruce this recipe up a bit.  I didn't think about it until later... it was still delicious on it's own!

Add the batter to your greased baking dish.

Bake for 45 minutes until it starts to turn golden and shows a few cracks on the top.

Let it cool for a bit, then slice it up and serve warm with some melted butter and honey.  Ohhhh man.  I ended up serving this with my chicken tortilla soup ... keep an eye out for my next post for that recipe!

Hope you enjoy, even if you like the crumbly stuff.

Courtzilla

Rainbow Bday Cupcakes

Tomorrow is my good friend Brenda's birthday party. To celebrate, I wanted to bake her something... when I asked what she wanted, she said "anything with cream cheese frosting". Oh good, that narrows it down. I love color. I love dinosaurs. I'm going to make rainbow dinosaur cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

Oh, I went there.

These didn't turn out as nice as I had hoped. They're a pretty good flavor, but the layers were a big fail, and I definitely used 23432 times too much batter in the first batch. They puffed up way higher than normal, which probably had something to do with the excess batter. Try them yourself and let me know how they go... they were still cute and delicious!

Oh, and I got the original recipe here.

You will need (for 10 cupcakes):
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup buttermilk - remember that sweet trick I taught you?
1 tsp vanilla extract
red, yellow, green and blue food colorings

Okay, first you'll want to combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium sized bowl. Like so.


Next, combine the sugar, eggs, vanilla, oil, and buttermilk in a large bowl.


Add the flour mixture slowly to the egg mixture, stirring as you go. In a bit, you'll end up with something like this!


Now for the fun part. Divide the batter into 5 smaller bowls. Add food coloring to each bowl. For the rainbow, I used blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Where's violet and indigo you say? I say bite me.


See how much batter I used? Don't do what I did. Only do one spoon full for each layer. Trust me.

To make the layers, put the blue in first, then green, then yellow, then orange, and top it off with red. It should look something like this.... but hopefully you're more patient than I am because I clearly started to get lazy.


Then, let these suckers bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Holy rise batman!

I didn't take pictures of me making the frosting, so sue me. It's basically 1/2 stick of butter and an 8oz package of cream cheese blended together. Then, you add 1 tsp of vanilla extract and anywhere from 2 1/2 to 4 cups of powdered sugar and mix it all together. Simple, tasty, I wish it was fluffier. Today was not my cupcake day. Anyway.... So I swirled some cream cheese glaze over the cakes... and added some decor.


Hahah! Look at these beauts! With the small bit of leftover batter, I made little cookie sized bites for my roommate to nibble on.


Ok and maybe one or two for me too.



I think he's my favorite.

Enjoy!

Oh... another tip... make sure to wash your hands after using the food dye, especially if it's the concentrated kind like mine. Looks like my hands got sunburned. Sexy.



Have a great weekend!

<3 Courtzilla

Blueberry Buttermilk Cake

Ho. Ho boy. When I came home today I had no intentions of making this. I was going to make meatballs. And mashed potatoes. And asparagus.

Then I looked in the fridge.... and realized I had about a quart of blueberries that weren't going to make it much longer. What to make what to make....

THIS.

- Photo and original recipe are from Smitten Kitchen, Deb is a genius people.


This is so much more than just a cake people. It's transcendent. Light, fluffy, and wonderfully blueberry-ey. And this time, I took pictures. Look I'm learning!

List of ingredients:
- 1 cup flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) softened butter (I used unsalted)
- 2/3 cup sugar, plus a bit more to sprinkle over the top later
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 1 egg
- about 1 cup of blueberries or whatever other berry you want to put in there.
- 1/2 cup buttermilk... who keeps buttermilk you ask? No one. So first I'll show you how to make it.

Ok... a ton of my favorite recipes have buttermilk in them, but I clearly don't make with buttermilk on a daily basis. That's why this little trick is handy.

For buttermilk, you'll need:



No, I'm serious. That's it. A good rule of thumb is that for every cup of milk, add 1 tbsp of vinegar, then let it sit for 10 minutes. Stir, and voila! Buttermilk. Note the wine glass in the background. Pure class.

On to cake!

- Start by pre-heating your oven to 400 degrees, unless your oven is like mine and loves to burn things. In my case, I lowered it to 325 degrees.

- Butter and flour a 9" circular cake pan. Or use one of those fancy flour in a can thingers. But I can't be bothered with fancy things like that.



Just butter it.... then drop like a tablespoon of flour in the pan, and tap it around over the sink so it spreads all over, and looks like this:


Once that's done, we'll need these characters.


Whisk your flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium sized bowl. Set this dry mixture to the side.


Next, we'll need these ingredients. Low fat butter is for wusses.


You'll want to beat the butter and sugar until it turns a light yellow, and gets pretty fluffy. It's at this point where I wish I had an electric mixer. Alas, this was probably the best work out my arm has gotten in about a month.


Once that's done, add an egg and the vanilla. It should look like this when you're done.


Ok, so here's where it gets a little tricky...ok so not really. Basically you want to dump in about 1/3 the flour, mix it together, dump in 1/2 the buttermilk, mix, flour, mix, buttermilk, mix, end of the flour, mix until just combined. Make sense? 1/3 the flour each time, 1/2 the buttermilk in between when you mix in the flour. Why do we do this? I have no idea.


Plop it into your pan, and scatter the blueberries all over the place. Sprinkle the top with sugar.


Yipes, it started to look like Courtzilla had taken over again. Sad part - this is me trying to be neat.

Back to the cake.


Yummo.

Bake for 20 - 25 minutes. This is what it looked like after about 10 minutes in my burn-happy oven.



But Courtney, you ask, how will I know it's done? AH HA! Another trick.

Take a knife and stick it in the middle of your cake. If you pull it out, and it comes away clean, the cake is good to go.

If you pull it out, and it looks like this...

Back in the oven. This is what it looked like when I pulled it out, about another 8 minutes later.


YUM. But.... it's missing something. Something to throw it over the top in true Courtzilla fashion. Cream cheese glaze? Yes please. And it couldn't be easier.

Characters:
Blatant self promotion. Check out that SWEET Sconnie pen.

Mix together 3 tbsp of cream cheese and 3 tbsp of milk. Make sure the cream cheese is softened, or else you'll get weird lumps in the glaze. Then, add 1 cup of powdered sugar and mix. Should be about this consistancy when you pull your fork away.

Drizzle over your cake. I added a couple of fresh blueberries to the top... because I CAN.



Oh man. Oh yum. Couldn't help myself, had to take a bite.


I then managed to eat a huge slice for dinner.


Didn't miss those meatballs one bit.

Enjoy!

<3 Courtzilla