Buttermilk

In my kitchen, buttermilk is one of those items I seldom use. I don't really understand its purpose. Recently I bought a small carton because I needed it to make a chocolate cake. Unfortunately the barely baked chocolate cake suffered a fatal death in the oven. (its head was decapitated when "someone" carelessly moved it)

So I had a lot of leftover buttermilk and I didn't want to throw it away. Can you drink buttermilk? I did a google and it seems buttermilk helps one to lose weight. Ridiculous right? Well, provided you use buttermilk to substitute snacks like potato chips which contains more calories. I see... Buttermilk is lower in fat than whole milk or butter but it contains saturated fats which is the bad kind of fats. Well, I still had to use it up somehow.

I suggested making blueberry muffins and my girl supported the idea. I remember I used buttermilk before when I made chocolate muffins. I got the blueberry muffin recipe from The Model Bakery. I reduced the amount of sugar but followed everything else.

The muffins smelled fantastic while they were baking.

Unfortunately, after eating 2 muffins (at one go), I realised I didn't want to eat anymore. My girl ate a couple and so did hubs. He liked that the muffins weren't sweet. My son ate one very reluctantly because he didn't like the blueberries. I suspect he didn't like the lack of sweetness as well. I had to force myself to eat a couple more the next day. You know the problem with baking? You need people other than yourself to eat the baked goods. Otherwise you'll end up putting on more and more weight.

I had more buttermilk to use up and my girl suggested pancakes. I found a recipe in The Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook and to my delight, I had the exact amount of buttermilk for the recipe! But I had run out of all-purpose flour. I did have a whole bag of cake flour so I used that instead. Wow! Pancakes made with cake flour is so much better! Very light.

I made plain pancakes for my kids and banana pancakes for hubs and I. As always I reduced the amount of sugar but no one complained. We eat our pancakes plain without adding any syrup.

By the way, yesterday I was baking some bread on parchment paper and while moving the bread around to avoid the hot spot, the parchment paper touched the heating element on the top of the oven and caught fire again! This time I was very calm and sprayed water into the oven to put out the fire. I wonder if there's something wrong with my oven.