Make your own beer cap ornaments! Learn how here.
Finally… my beer print series is complete and ready for the wall!
Finally finishing my beer ingredients print set! I like how this print turned out.
Making beer bread… again
After my last attempt at beer bread I decided to try again, this time with fresh baking powder. This time I made the plain variety from Bake at 350 using Anchor Christmas Ale:
I only baked the bread for 50 minutes at this time, in the hope that would make the bread fluffier with a softer crust. The bread was somewhat less dense this time but still had a rather hard crust. I’m not certain why the crust is so hard but the bread is pretty tasty warm out of the oven:
Making beer bread
Since I came across this recipe for different types of beer bread on Bake at 350, I knew I wanted to try it. My previous experience with beer bread was delicious. A softball party for team “Beer Me” was the perfect opportunity to bake up a batch, or two as it turns out.
I decided to make a loaf of the orange nutmeg for the party and a loaf of gruyere and rosemary for my husband to take to work.
The recipe calls for self rising flour which we don’t have and I’ve never used it before. My husband pointed me to wikipedia which says you can make your own self rising flour by adding 1 tsp of baking power and 1/2 tsp of salt to regular flour. I combined those ingredients with a bottle of beer (Avery White for the orange nutmeg bread), 3 tablespoons of sugar, zest from an orange and freshly grated nutmeg.
For the gruyere and rosemary bread, I used a bottle of Real Ale Pale Ale.
I then baked the breads for 1 hour at 350. The bread smelled wonderful. When I took it out, the orange rosemary bread was drizzled with a fresh squeezed orange juice and powdered sugar glaze.
The gruyere rosemary bread was covered with butter.
While the bread looked tasty, it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped. The baking powder must have been too old because the bread turned out too hard. I also think a sweeter bread would have been better.
Making stout into cake
Yes, I really did bake two cakes this week. The second one was for my husband’s birthday. This is the second time I’ve made this chocolate stout cake from use real butter. Yes, the recipe really is in that blog post after you scroll past all of the pictures.
This year, I changed two things from what I did last year. I substituted half of the butter for applesauce to make the cake moister (which worked) and I used a milk chocolate icing that my husband bought rather than the fudge icing I used last year. I recommend the fudge icing. Both years I used Guinness in the cake because we happened to have some and it’s not fancy enough for my local beer snob to drink.
Guinness, butter, and applesauce, oh my!
Heating the stout and butter, and then after the butter melted, adding the applesauce:
Mixing in the cocoa powder:
Mixing eggs and sour cream:
Adding the chocolate mixture:
Ready for the oven!
Out of the oven!
First layer iced:
Done!
The making of a new obsession…
Remember my new gifts? I’ve began phase one of using them for a new project. I’ve started drawing beer things. Many ideas are floating in my head about how this will play out.
A bottle of Fireman’s 4:
The Southern Star logo (not yet traced with darker lines):
