Corn Bread Turtle-style!

D'you remember the wonderful parcel I received recently, from a certain DebTurtle? 

It had Sweeties!!

And some Cornmeal, with a recipe to try out my very own American-style Cornbread!

So, today I did just that. 

I found the recipe and cornmeal,

 got my ingredients together,

and also my equipment - don't you love my Cup Measures? So cute! 

I measured out my 1 Cup of Cornmeal

This part is strange for me - here in U.K. we generally write / measure recipes by weight or liquid measures, rather than cups-full (or part-cups).  It seemed strange to put my cornmeal, flour etc into those little cup things. 

All the dry ingredients in the bowl.

I then mixed up the "wet" ingredients in a jug; again it seemed strange to measure the liquids in cups (except the egg, which is 1 Egg in any "language"!).

The other odd thing was using vegetable oil, instead of margarine or butter.  In U.K. we generally use a solid fat in our baking recipes, or sometimes a softer "tub margarine", which is still solid, but has been softened already.  Margarine is a mixture of vegetable fats (sometimes with animal fats too), which stays fairly hard at fridge temperature and needs to be beaten quite hard to soften it (or put in the microwave for a short while - but don't tell Delia!). So I have very few recipes that use liquid fats, so this was an interesting experiment for me!

Once it was all mixed together, the batter/mixture went into the tin,

then into the oven at 200 degrees Celsius (same as Deb's 400F!). 

It came out looking a bit brownish on top, with a slightly crusty surface - like bread or scones. I let it cool for a while,

then I cut it into pieces.

We had Hungarian Goulash (sort-of!) for dinner tonight, with rice and a nice sun-dried tomato bread, from the Italian deli. stall at the Farmers'/Local Produce Market that is held at the local garden centre once a month.  It seemed a good chance to try out our interesting new food, so I put pieces of Corn Bread in the dish, along with the warm bread slices. 

We put butter on some of it and dunked it in the paprika & tomato sauce with our stew. 

It was yummy!

This one's definitely a "keeper"! 

I made this batch without sugar, as I wanted a plain, savoury bread.  Next time I will use a little sugar.  I think I'll also use my slightly smaller square pan, as the bread was a bit thin and dry - I think it will be moister and nicer if it's in a smaller pan and can be in deeper chunks!

So, thanks Deb - it was fun. X