Saturday, April 10, 2010

A Recipe is just a Guide

I love to bake. I love to bake homemade bread, dessert breads, cakes, pies, cookies - you name it. Oh, I don't bake much anymore due to the fact that if it's in the house, I'll eat it. That and the fact that the weight just doesn't come off at all anymore! So, it's a rare occasion that I bake. But today was a day that I decided I wanted to make some peach muffins. I love the Sweet Memory canned peaches that are in a cinnamon and brown sugar syrup and I decided to use those to make the muffins. I always like to try out new recipes so I got on foodtv.com and looked up a recipe for peach muffins. I found one that I liked that had a pecan and brown sugar crumb topping and I got ready to make some muffins. Now, when I bake or try a recipe, I use the recipe as a guide and almost never follow it exactly. I'm not afraid to experiment! So as I'm putting together the recipe I modify, add blueberries, add cinnamon, increase the baking powder, add juice from the can of peaches, deleted the crumb topping, added pecans to the batter and decided my batter would make better peach pecan bread! So I lowered the temperature, poured the batter into 2 loaf pans, added pecans to the top of one loaf, and baked for an hour. I then added a light powdered sugar glaze over the top when they were done baking. Ohh, heavenly bread! The texture is a cross between dessert bread and a muffin so it it so incredibly moist and yummy! Wish I could share it with all of you, but the problem now with using a recipe as a guide, I don't think I could duplicate it exactly - I don't use exact measurements- I just eyeball. But this is definitely one recipe that I'm going to try and go back and write down all my changes!