Baileys Oat and Corn Flour Loaf

I recently bought The Cornbread Gospels from Amazon and tried out one of their methods, which is to fill my slow cooker with water halfway and place an ovensafe container inside, above a trivet-like device, which could be a wadded up ball of foil just to prevent the bottom of the container from coming in direct contact with the bottom of the slow cooker. So we're essentially steaming the bread. I think the method turned out a success! I didn't have to watch for burns, and the bread was moist and evenly heated! So score on the method!

But the actual bread of my choosing was a semi disaster. I promise promise promise... next bread I make will be that cornbread mix where I can't possibly mess up! This one, I felt like being adventurous, since sometimes you strike gold when you experiment. Alas, this proved to be one of the failures. I mixed whole grain oat and corn flours with baking soda and vital wheat gluten, and then used Baileys Irish Cream as a sort of heavy cream substitute, and some of that praline liqueur just for kicks. Those were the sole liquids binding this dough. All looked well at the end of the 4 hour setting. The loaf released cleanly from my stainless steel container, and there was nothing odd about the aroma. Even the texture looked fine as I broke off a piece... But let me tell you that one bite of this will have you crying for a chaser! I thought the alcohol would have cooked off but I guess not, because this was basically alcoholic bread! I tried smearing on some Kerrygold salted butter but the Baileys/praline kick completely overwhelmed the butter. Finally I found that topping the bread with gobs of chocolate chips helped to tone down and mitigate the burn. This was almost reminiscent of my oatmeal cooked in beer, except that was not as strong, bitter, or fragrant as this one.

So anyway, as a default plan, I had originally settled on just slicing this loaf and making chocolate chip sandwiches with them to stick them in the freezer for a rainy day. But then I got another potentially wise or disastrous idea (see next post)...