Corn bread muffins and soup.

Links to my fellow baker's in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge, 2011!  Here are links to their versions of this bread.  They are all very talented baker's, who have gotten together to share their results from baking the Bread's in Peter Reinhart's book Bread Baker's Apprentice.


Our host Chris at A Ku Indeed!
Coz at ScratchBaker 
Jim at OvenMinded
Geraint at Sgratch13
Adam at Within Reason 
NancyB at Bread&Cake&More

I know that the BBA Corn Bread Muffins recipe isn't for a couple weeks yet, but decided to go ahead and make them to go with my soup. I made some substitutions, mostly just replaced the white sugar with splenda, and regular flour with Hard Winter Red fresh ground. I soaked all the flour for a few hours (wish I had done it overnight) with the kefir and cornmeal. Kefir is a fermented milk product, very similar to buttermilk.

Here is my soaker....

After soaking for several hours, I gathered the rest of my ingredients together like BBA suggests.  This is actually a really really good idea for those of us who forget things like salt!

On the left is my bowl of honey, eggs, and butter.  To the right is the splenda, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and brown sugar.  I decided to use the honey and brown sugar in a small amount, just because I have had really bad luck using only splenda in quick breads and cookies.  They usually come out pretty flat looking for some reason.

Frozen corn thawing before adding to the mix.  That is a LOT of corn to add to cornbread and I believe it made my cornbread to wet.

All thawed and ready to be mixed with the other ingredients.  I mixed till it was just mixed in, maybe a minute or so.

This is pretty watery looking to me, and I think it has way to much corn in it.  I will put a note next to this recipe to use less.  I never seem to have much luck with quickbreads, they are usually simply ok, never really "awesome".

Here I have filled the muffin tins with the batter and put the bacon on the top.  I used paper cupcake thingy's, because my cupcake pans are pretty old and looking battered.  These should rise and be domed on top after they are baked.

Here they are after baking for 20 minutes at 350* like suggested.  I am not sure if it was the splenda that made them flatter than I thought they should be, or maybe the whole wheat flour.  They tasted good with the soup though, which is what matters the most.  I also ended up with 24 muffins, so I guess we will be eating them for a very long time!  

Maybe someday I will focus on quickbreads and try to perfect my skills there.  I did manage to make an awesome batch of biscuits using my King Arthur Baker's Companion cookbook a few weeks ago.  Another highly recommended book, it gives you good advice on many different baked goods.  It doesn't have a lot of pictures, but it does have drawings and is my top recommendation for a baking cookbook.