Buttermilk Cornbread

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year eveyone! I hope you all had a great holiday season and ate way too much delicious food like I did! I'm finally getting a chance to post about all the cooking I did over Christmas and in the past week for both my nephew and brother in law's birthdays.

My family usually gets together about a month before Christmas so we can work out the Christmas menu and who will be cooking what. My list this year included 2 desserts, Turkey and rolls. We usually go for the turkey breast roll for Christmas, just because it's easy and always turns out really well. It's very moist and yummy. This year, however, I decided to do something different and buy and cook a turkey for the first time in my life! I was a little nervous about it, especially about getting the cooking times right but in the end I was really happy with how it turned out. I chose a Martha Stewart recipe for my Turkey, which had a brown sugar and mustard glaze and a pecan cornbread dressing (or stuffing).

A few days before Christmas I decided to cook the Buttermilk Cornbread mainly so it was one less thing I had to cook on Christmas day. I live in Australia where ready made cornbread isn't accessible, so I had to cook my own.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted, plus more for baking pan

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 cup plain flour

1/4 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

2 eggs

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 205 degrees Celsius. Grease a square baking pan. In a bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking power, baking soda and salt. In another bowl, whisk together buttermilk, butter and eggs. Add to flour mixture and stir just until combined. Transfer to baking pan and smooth top.

2. Bake until a toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean, from 20 to 25 minutes. Let bread cool on a wire rack before serving.

This bread was a lot easier to make than I had imagined. I actually snuck a taste of it and I thought it tasted really nice on it's own too. It was a relief to get something out of the way before Christmas and step one of the Turkey making out of the way.