Light and fluffy cornbread with homemade jam

Today we found ourselves sans pain again! Oh Mon Dieu...my R loves his bread and it's a constant joke every day as we both monitor the level of bread we have in the kitchen and the freezer. We always keep at least one or two loaves in the freezer for emergencies. Yes, we have bread emergencies, like today and yesterday in fact. R's favorite bread isn't made on Sundays and it sold out early on Saturday. Why??? I don't know...but there is probably some law against bakers toiling on a Sunday.

Given our dire circumstances, I decided to make cornbread. Light and fluffy ones. To serve with the three homemade confitures our neighbors P and D gave us recently. The cerise jam was made using cherries from our trees; and the cassis/groseille and mirabelle confitures were made using berries and prunes from their garden. Mmmm. Pinch me because I think I'm in heaven.

It is a brilliant 17C outside, and I have mail from the U.S., so R and I are walking down to La Poste soon. Make some cornbread and let me know how it came out for you.

Cornbread from scratch is amazingly simple to make. It's great straight out of the oven or at room temperature.

LIGHT AND FLUFFY CORNBREAD
INGREDIENTS
Cornmeal, fine = 1 cup or 177 g
Flour, all purpose = 1 cup or 128 g
Sugar, granulated = 6 TBS or 75 g
Baking powder = 2 1/2 teaspoon
Baking soda = 1/2 teaspoon
Oil = 1/3 cup or 0.08 L
Butter, melted = 3 Tablespoons or 42.53 g
2 eggs, beaten
Milk = 1 1/4 cup or 0.30 L

INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 350F or 176C and generously butter a 8" square pan.
1. Add all dry ingredients into a large bowl.
2. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients.
3. Add all your wet ingredients into the center of this well: oil, butter, eggs, and milk.
4. Stir until just mixed (do not overstir, batter is runny).
5. Pour the batter into a pre-buttered pan and bake in middle rack for 30 - 35 minutes, until the top is a golden brown.
6. Let cool for a few minutes before serving with jam, jelly. Sometimes I just eat it straight from the pan.

All my cookbooks in Boston use American Standard Units (cups, tablespoons, etc) while here, I find myself stumbling upon French recipes in the Metric System. I think Metric makes more sense because it's less variable. Also, I am missing my stainless steel measuring cups here, so I had to start converting.

To make it easier on myself and readers who want to follow my recipes (which are not all converted), I've compiled a quick reference: Baking and Cooking Conversion Chart (though I was cursing Blogger for not making it easy to work with tables imported from Excel).

If you have tips on working with tables in Blogger, or want to share your own cornbread or cornbread muffin recipes, please do.