Golden Gingerbread

Adam and I made gingerbread from my newest cook book The Bread Machine Bible by Anne Sheasby. There's so many yummy sounding recipes we can't wait to try like the pesto-parmesan pull apart. I wasn't particularly thrilled about making gingerbread, but Adam talked me into it. We had everything.... or did we? Everything except the brown sugar. We debated about going to the store,or had gotten some from Adams mom? Wait one minute! We have molasses and sugar, we don't need to go anywhere! So I looked it up... One cup of sugar to one Tablespoon of molasses for light brown sugar and two Tablespoons of molasses for dark brown sugar. Okay NOW we have everything. We did everything, poured it in the bread pan, set it, and licked the bowl. Oh it was so good I couldn't wait for it to be finished. An hour or so later it was finally done! My only question now was what did we do wrong? It didn't rise very much. It was very dense and heavy and the crust was hard to cut through. But the middle was so moist and so good! We will make this bread again, hopefully next time it'll rise more.

Golden Gingerbread

½ cup packed light soft brown sugar

¾ stick butter

½ cup golden syrup or light corn syrup

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons ground gingerbread

1 egg, beaten

2/3 cup milk

a pinch of salt

~ Remove the kneading blade from the bread pan. Remove the bread pan from the machine, grease and line the bottom and sides of the pan, and set aside.

~ place the sugar, butter and syrup in a small sauce pan and heat slowly, stirring, until melted and blended. Remove the pan from the heat and cool slightly. Sift the flour, salt, baking powder, and ginger into a bowl and make a well in the middle. Mix together the egg and milk and pour into the well along with the melted mixture. Beat together using a wooden spoon until smooth and throughly mixed. Pour into the bread pan.

~ Place the bread pan in position in the machine and close the lid. Set the machine to “bake only” for 60 minutes. Press start.

~ After baking, a fine skewer inserted into the middle of the gingerbread should come out clean. If the gingerbread requires more baking, bake on the same setting 5 to 10 minutes longer, or until baked through.

~ Remove the bread pan from the machine using oven mitts, then leave to stand 5 minutes, before turning the gingerbread out onto a wire rack to cool. Serve warm or cold in slices.

Today I took it upon myself to make another black bean recipe. The black bean brownies. They were so easy to make. I put everything in the food processor, sprayed the pan and popped them in the oven. They took about 25-30 minutes to cook. I let them cool just barely enough to cut them. They were good. Really moist, soft cakey, smooth, but I think next time I'll cook them a tiny bit less for more fudgy-ness. You can't taste the black beans at all. I did not add any of the coffee, but it had a slight coffee flavor. They are not super chocolately. For a 'healthy' brownie they are not too shabby.