Cornbread and all the fixin's

So on this edition of the Med Chef I give you my cornbread recipe and plenty more to follow as I finish the Mac and Cheese tomorrow along with all of the other delights my friends are making for our pot luck Thanksgiving in our home away from home.

And I actually wrote out the ingredients this time.  Reason being is that baking is not like cooking, you need to get all the measurements down or else it can come back to bite you.  For those of you who can't see that it is:

1 Cup of Cornmeal

3 Cups of AP Flour

1 1/3 cup of Sugar

2 Tbps of Baking Powder

1 Tsp Salt

2/3 Cup of Vegetable Oil

1/3 Cup Melted Butter

2 Tbsps Honey/Brown Sugar

2 1/2 cups Whole Milk

and 4 Eggs (Whole and scrambled)

So whenever I bake I make sure to get all the ingredients together and right.  Plus I felt like Paula Dean by pre-sorting them and putting them in containers to make for an easier snapshot and actually an easier recipe.  One thing to note is I let the eggs come to room temperature (which isn't hard in the Caribbean) along with most of the ingredients.

Next I incorporated all the dry ingredients first and it reminded me of those bottles I used to have as a kid with the different colored sand.  Less I digress...

Then I sifted it all to make it homogenous

 Next I mixed all the wet ingredients together in my fancy container, like so...

And then Finally mixed it all together making sure  there were no lumps or bumps along the by using my cake mixer.  Best 4 bucks I ever spent!

Now the recipe called for me to bake it at 350 F for 45 minutes in a 9 by 12 inch pan.  Since there are about 20 of us getting together I figured making them cupcake style would best suit our needs.  So I simply took some cupcake trays and filled them 2/3 of the way up.  They won't plump up out of the tray too much but they'll try.

Now the thing was that the recipe was different for the way I made them.  Since I   essentially reduced the size of the cooking space (or maximized it depending on your interpretation)  the cornbread cooked in only 17 minutes and looked like this!  A smaller second batch I did I lowered the heat at about 300 F and it came out perfect in 20-25 minutes.  That would be my advise for how to get them exactly the way you want them.  

And thats it for now as the prelim cooking is over and tomorrow the real cooking begins with turkey and the rest of the fixins!

Of course you have to have it fresh out of the over with some butter....yummy!