Classic Corn Bread

Hey Y'all.

July hit me like a ton of bricks. You didn't think I forgot about you, did you? 

Working two jobs, taking 11 credits at school and throwing the occasional trip into the mix has kept me incredibly busy. I have been cooking, I just haven't had time to sit down at the computer and type it up.

This next week I'll be on vacation as well, visiting the fam on the east coast, so unfortunately I'll probably have sparse posting until the end of the month, when school starts up again. Just fair warning!

Speaking of the East Coast...

Because I grew up on the East Coast, with family ranging from Georgia to Pennsylvania, I have a very interesting frame of reference for food. There are many things that I love that are regional foods, but I don’t associate them with regional foods – I just associate them with growing up. Foods such as hominy and liver pudding, or puddin’ as I like to say, shrimp and grits, biscuits and sausage gravy, scrapple and whoopie pies are still some of my favorites, but trying to find versions reminiscent of home out in the Midwest can be difficult.


Cornbread is also very regional – most places have it, but how it’s prepared and eaten is very location-specific. I like my cornbread ‘southern-style” sweet and cakey. It can have jalapeño, cheese and/or bits of corn in it, but the sweeter, the better.


I’ve made a few recipes from scratch, blindly following the recipe with no real idea of the expected end result. Typically the cornbread was too dry, and not sweet enough. I figured this time I would try the recipe on the back of the corn meal carton, who knows cornbread better than the people that make the main ingredient for it? I upped the amount of sugar in the recipe, of course, but kept the rest the same.


And it was delicious.


I’ve made the recipe a few times now, occasionally adding cheese, corn and jalepenos to it, and also making it in mini loaf pans, as shown in this post, muffin tins and, my all time favorite – my cast iron corn stick pan.




Sweet Southern Corn Bread
Adapted from the Back of the Quaker Cornmeal Canister

Yield one 8x8 Pan
You will need:
1-¼ cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup Quaker Corn Meal
6 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 cup milk
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 egg whites beaten or 1 whole egg

Directions
Mix the dry ingredients. Beat the egg. Add the wet ingredients to dry. Pour into a buttered 8x8 or 9x9 casserole dish. Bake at 400 for 20-25 minutes.