Mmm... Beer Bread.

This is my favorite Pin recipe right now.  The moment I found it, I knew the author should be given her own billboard,  or reality show, or (at very least) the Nobel Peace Prize.

This recipe combines bread, And beer, And honey? 

Shut the Oven Door!

As soon as I saw the list of ingredients, I ran to my kitchen.  I had everything but honey.  Never fear, blog reader! I am the queen of reasonable substitutions.  Instead of honey, I had real maple syrup.  And I had a lonely bottle of Blue Moon's fall brew wasting away in my drawer.  Oh, and I mixed half the white flour with whole wheat (I may have... uh, run out of white).

I don't have pics of the first round, or the second, or the third...  but all of my trials have been good.  You'll just have to trust me on that.

I was instantly enchanted with the simplicity of this recipe. Part of the appeal is the inherent versatility: different brews, different sweeteners, add ins, toppings...

It's like the Sonic Drinks of Bread!

OK. OK. Not like Sonic*.

But it IS versatile.

I am sharing my Blueberry Wheat version.

1c whole wheat flour
2c all purpose flour (see notes below)
1tbs baking Powder
1tsp salt
2 tbs regular sugar
2 tbs honey (see notes below)
12 oz Wild Blue Blueberry Lager (see notes below)

4+ tbs butter (see notes below)

 Pre-heat oven to 350.

Butter melting in oven

While oven is pre-heating, I melt the butter in the baking pan, right in the oven, for just a few minutes.

Keep an eye on that butter! Don't let it burn.  I remove it when it is mostly melted.

Flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, honey

While butter is turning into melty, liquid gold, mix dry ingredients until just combined.  Here, I jumped the gun and added the honey before I mixed the dry ingredients.  It still worked, but I don't recommend doing this, OK?

Did you take the butter out of the oven?   If so, set aside. You'll need it in just a minute.  If not, do it now!

fizzy, purple Wild Blue is added to mix

Once dry ingredients are combined, add the wet.  I add the sweetener, then the beer.  I suppose you can do it in any order.  Because I am using a (blue) fruit lager, my beer is purple.  Don't be alarmed by the color.  It is not the blood of a purple, singing dinosaur, no matter what my teenager says.
 
 Mix with fork until all the dry is combined with the wet ingredients.  The dough will form a sticky blob in the bottom of the bowl.

Next, dump the lump into your loaf pan, right on top of that melted butter.

I add a little more melted butter to the top, too.  Butter IS good. 

 Bake at 350 30-40 minutes until knife inserted in middle comes out clean.  I invert mine on a plate right away when I bake with my beloved silicone loaf pan.   The outside is nice and brown and crusty, and the inside is soft. 

finished product

 While this was cooking, I made the best topping in the world for this bread (or at least thus far): homemade sweet butter.  I simply mixed heavy whipping cream, agave syrup, and cinnamon in a clean jelly jar.  I didn't measure any thing.  Just added.  And then I shook it.  And shook it.  And shook it.  It takes a while, but the end product is worth it.  Once it forms a solid lump, pour off remaining liquid and refrigerate until you're ready to use it.

Cream, agave, cinnamon

Sweet Cinnamon Butter

  Try it with honey and cinnamon!  I've made it to where it tastes just like Texas Roadhouse's honey- cinnamon butter, only without the powdered sugar.  

I've also made it with a dollup of blueberry preserves.  Home made  blueberry butter gets the stamp of approval from a most discerning critic-in-residence, much to my chagrin (to see the critic, scroll down). 



 NOTES:
 Flour:  I have tried 3c All Purpose; 3c Whole Wheat; 1.5c wheat, 1.5c all purpose; and(like this recipe) 1c wheat, 2c all purpose.  They all have worked well.  Wheat gives it a hearty, heavier texture.  My teen hates it.  I prefer it.  The 3c all purpose was kind of gummy to me.  I was called insane, though.  Truely, I was. By everyone else that tried it.

Liquid Sweetener:  I've used honey, agave, and  pure maple syrup.  My honey is raw, and as local as I can find in my supermarket.  My agave syrup is organic.  With the REAL maple syrup, I had to add an extra tbs. Don't use pancake syrup. 0_o

Tonight's selection

Beer: I've yet to use a beer that didn't turn out well.  I usually use what's on hand, or what strikes me at United's build your own 6 pack station.  That's how I found the Wild Blue.  It comes in blackberry and raspberry, too.  I sipped the blackberry and it tasted like a stout Arbor Mist Blackberry Merlot.  Very good, but I am not sure I could drink a whole bottle.  But, it will make a great bread.  I've not actually consumed the Wild Blue as a beverage.  I keep baking it in bread!  Monty Python's Holy GrAle was good, but didn't make me say "Ni!"  I prefer sweet or dark beers. The next time I am near a Central Market, I am scoring a Lambic (cherry, strawberry, or peach) and giving that a go. Shiner Bock is also on my list of beers to try VERY soon.

Butter: REAL  BUTTER.  People, do NOT consume that vegetable oil crap! It's almost plastic.  Real butter will not kill you.  You may reduce the amount.  I go for over kill.  Yummy, yummy over kill.

Pan:  My pan is 9"x5".  When I baked in paper loaf pans (found at Central Market), I made two smaller loafs that baked for about 25 minutes and had to cool them before I tore them out of those hateful skins of dead trees.  Needless to say, acquiring another silicone loaf pan is high on my priority list. 

 Did you try something different?  Let me know!  I would love to hear your cheers and jeers.

"Don't leave your blueberry butter unattended.  It's my favorite."

*If you're in an area that's not cool enough to have a Sonic, it's a drive-in restaurant that has thousands of drink combinations (398, 929 combinations, or so they say).  You can go all crazy and stuff, if you want.  Or you could be cool like me, on the rare occasion I drink cokes, and order a Dr Pepper with real cherries.  Sonics are the new DQs for small towns around here.  It used to be you weren't a real town without a DQ, but now a Sonic gives you credibility.  I live in a town with NUMEROUS Sonics, but no Central Market.  :(

For My First Trick... Upholstery Cleaner

Trying to decide which of my hundreds of Pinterest Pins is important enough to be my inaugural project is no easy task.

About as easy as teaching Twitter how to spell inaugural.

Actually, it wasn't so much a matter of ease, as remembering to document my experiments.

Prior to starting this blog, I actually took pictures of a trial run with an upholstery cleaner (right before I learned to spell that word, too).

I found this Link with a simple cleaner that seemed harmless enough.  I mean, my seats are AWFUL.  The ingredients are common household ingredients.  I had most of them, anyway.

Did I mention my seats were nasty? As in you probably should have had a haz-mat suit on before you put your butt there?

Eeeeeew.

I bought this car when I was going to college (full time), still working an 8-5 job, and the mother of a young elementary student. I was in my car A LOT. I consumed copious amounts of coffee to keep me sane during the endless onslaught of singing Barbie tunes in my car (although, to be fair to my daughter, I was also subjected to endless Pink Floyd, Barlow Girl, or the Les Mis Broadway soundtrack, depending on her mood); I changed into my work clothes in my car (ill advised whilst driving); I put what little makeup I wore on in my car; I did homework in my car; I ate in my car; I... well, you have the picture. Over time, maintaining my upholstery became less of a priority.  I was busy!  My front seat was a receptacle for what I needed at my finger tips at the moment.  Enter fast food stains, coffee stains, coke stains, mystery stains from the kid, coffee stains, ink, coffee stains, red Texas clay, coffee stains...

Quite frankly, it's embarrassing.  I want to call them the worst seats in town, but I know that's not true.  I live in a town with 3 universities, branches of a major state university's grad school, two technical schools, and a junior college... and an airbase.  That's a lot of  nasty car potential driving around.  So, major-bad, but not the worst.
 
I was primed for a good cleaner.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I was primed for ANY cleaner that might, maybe, sort of clean my seats.  I don't have to tell you I was grateful to find the link pinned to the DIY section.

So, I purchased what ingredients I didn't have (club soda), mixed up the cleaner, and went outside on a bitter-freaking cold, but sunny, day.  I started with my front passenger seat:

What color is that?

Spray. Spray. Spray.  Scrub...

I tried to scrub in a circular motion, like the blog says, but my seats were having none of that. I scrubbed back and forth, front to back.  

My first impression echoed my concerns upon reading the recipe.  1 cup of liquid dawn is a lot of sudsy soap.  I was scrubbing up some seriously foul foam.  It didn't smell good, either.  The vinegar was a bit overwhelming.

Don't ask. Just scrub.

So, I went and grabbed this tiny (read: no power) 1 gallon wet vac that was sitting in my carport.  It plugs into the outlet in my car, so it was handy.  I used it to suck up nasty foam.

I was worried about the soap making the fabric stiff, so I sprayed a little water on it.  Don't do that! More foam.  Lots more foam.  So much foam.  My little wet vac hated me. 

I scrubbed and sucked up foam for a good 10-15 minutes-- remember my seats were revolting. 

The picture of progress

What did I see?  Progress!  It was working.  It smelled, but it was working!  I stayed with the back section of the seat (area with the brush laying on it in pics, above) I quit when my hands got too cold to scrub any longer, left the windows down, and went about my Sunday.

When the seats had dried a bit, I saw REMARKABLE progress.  No more big ugly coke/coffee/food stains where I scrubbed.

This cleaner works.  It was a lot of scrubbing, but it works better than the commercial products I tried in my previous vehicle.  I chose to think of the the scrubbing as an arm workout.

The smell, however, was gag-tastic.  It was strong for the first couple of days, but has faded. More than a week later, I can still detect a (very) faint odor when the car warms up.

Cue the dramatics from the teen.  She refused to sit in the front seat for the first four days.  She has threatened my sanity if I ever use the cleaner again...

But the back seat, her realm/closet/locker/dining room, is even worse.

We All Start Somewhere

Bit plain right now.  Trying to get this thing up and running.  I have a couple of stories to share about my experiments from Pinterest. Bear with me.  More coming soon.