Week 31 – Beer Bread

This last week culminated with a very busy but fun weekend: my brother-in-law Nick and his wife Erin came up from Oxford to visit and we took a lovely trip to one of my absolute favourite places in the world, St Andrews. And what better to do in the home of golf than watch some top class competition, the Women's British Open to be exact (won by American Stacy Lewis).

With the baking challenge in mind my first instinct was to try to make something golf related or themed and I found some amazing looking golf ball ‘cake pops’ on the food and drink section of Pinterest http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=golf%20cake%20pop .If you haven't heard of or been on Pinterest it's just like a big online version of an old fashioned notice board where you can 'pin' your fave photos of things. Every pinned photo is linked to the relevant website where the image/product/recipe etc. came from, it's super fun and quite addictive. I haven't made cake pops yet and they seem to be the trendy thing in the cake world at the moment so I was quite keen, but sadly I couldn't seem to get hold of the golf ball moulds anywhere in the UK so that was off the cards.

Back on the quest of a new recipe I continued to browse on Pinterest and found a few bread recipes and decided I would give it a go! I have long been saying I need to try to expand my savoury range and bread seemed like a good way to go. The recipe that caught my eye was for beer bread, it was from an American website food.com and it had some seriously good reviews from people who had made before it so I thought I would give it a whirl. Brilliantly it only had 4 ingredients, I think it is probably the fewest number of ingredients I've ever baked with which made it incredibly straightforward.
http://www.food.com/recipe/sweet-beer-bread-70366?mode=metric&scaleto=1.0&st=null

Ingredients

• 3 cups self-raising flour

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 x (12 ounce) bottle beer (Non-Alcoholic or Light Beer may be substituted) I used Kronenbourg 1664, because that’s what we had in the house. I saw on another recipe that its best to use a warm beer for beer bread so I did that and then popped what was left in the fridge for Dave to enjoy later!

• 1/4 cup butter or 1/4 cup margarine, melted. I used salted butter which seemed to add a nice salty/sweet taste to the crust.

All these ingredients are measured in the American cups measures. I happen to have a set of cups from my time living in the US (you can buy them over here relatively cheaply so it’s probably worth the investment for a few pounds if you want to use a few American recipes) but if you don’t you can google the conversion to ml’s/grams quite easily on websites like

http://allrecipes.com/howto/cup-to-gram-conversions/

Method

1.  Stir together first 3 ingredients; pour into a lightly greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.

2.  Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.
3.  Pour melted butter over top.
4.  Bake 10 more minutes. I took my loaf out after the 45 minutes and noticed it had a slightly soggy bottom (tut tut tut Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry would not be happy) and was a bit doughy when I cut a slice so I popped it back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes until it was a little bit more firmer and crispy. 

Well I have to say the bread went down a treat according to Dave, Nick and Erin who all had several slices over the weekend! It tasted a bit like corn bread in that it was sweet and salty at the same time, there was a slight hint of beer but it wasn’t overwhelming which was good because I’m not a big beer drinker.  You could use it with savoury things like paté but it toasted well so we enjoyed it for breakfast with jam.

All in all for my first adventure into the world of bread it went remarkably well. I’m not sure Paul Hollywood would really call it bread because you didn’t have to use yeast (that’s because you can cheat with the beer) and there is no kneading but it looked like bread and had a surprisingly bready texture so I say it is bread! 

See you next week for another yummy bake x

Linds xx