Bacon Chedder Cheese Bread (Secret Recipe Club: Eat Laugh Love)

It's time for my 2nd month of participating with the Secret Recipe Club!  If you haven't seen the posts before, it's a group where everyone is assigned a blog to secretly search through the archives and find a recipe to prepare and share on a designated date.  I'm finding so many fabulous blogs every month!

This month, I was assigned Eat Laugh Love.  Denise is also a working mom who loves to cook, and her recipes would appeal to anyone looking for ideas to feed their family.  Denise and her family just finished a hunger challenge where they could only spend $4 a day per person in the family on food.  I found her posts on this challenge interesting and definitely something to think about when we are feeding our own family. 

As I was perusing her blog, I hit upon a few different recipes that sounded delicious, but I kept going back to her post on Bacon Chedder Cheese Bread. 




We had our first chilly morning last week and it was time to pull out some homemade vegetable soup from the freezer.  I knew this bread would be a nice compliment to the soup, because it's always nice to dip bits of bread into soup on a cool evening.

The bread was easy to put together and even though the original recipe was to bake it in a large bread pan, I opted to make mini loaves.  I had to adapt the recipe slightly based on items I had on hand. 

The result was a dense, smokey flavored bread.  I would even venture to say that this bread would be perfect with your favorite chili while watching the game on a Sunday afternoon. 


Bacon Chedder Cheese Bread
Adapted from:  Eat Laugh Love

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound bacon, cooked and crumbled
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 /2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt
• couple grinds of black peppercorns
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1/4 cup butter flavor Crisco (shortening)
• 1 cup coarsely shredded sharp chedder cheese
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 1/4 cup low-fat buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Directions

1.  Heat oven to 350 degrees and spray mini loaf pans with cooking spray.
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar and spices.  Add in the shortening and combine by hand until it looks like coarse sand (I used a hand mixer to combine).  Add cheese and toss to combine.
3. In another bowl, combine eggs, buttermilk and Worcestershire sauce.
4. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and mix until almost incorporated.  Gently fold in the bacon crumbles.  Do not overmix.
5. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 25-28 minutes - until a toothpick comes out clean from the center. 
6. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes.

Please note that all photos and content belong to Patsy Kreitman, unless otherwise noted. If you want to use something please ask first.