Mum's molasses bread

Every Thursday, for fourteen years, I went to piano lessons and sat all of the exams up to grade VII. Yet I don't have a natural flare for the instrument and after all the years I still need sheet music in front of me when I sit down to play. At family sing songs, when urged to play, I always feel I ruin the vibe when I interrupt the general merriment with Opus 28 by Chopin!

Anyway, I fear sometimes that I am the same when it comes to food, relying too heavily on recipes and not my own instinct. My mother, a great cook, rarely opens a cookery book but produces gorgeous meals from her head, using ideas she's learned form experience, memory and practice. Her brown bread is no different. She came up with the recipe after years of tweaking and hardly ever measures any of the ingredients, but goes by eye. Last night I made her brown bread and it worked a treat! Making it made me feel how those musicians who just join in in impromptu sessions must feel...I was just going with the flow, and it felt great!

This is the (loose) recipe for my Mum's brown bread.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb plain white flour

1/2 lb wholemeal flour

1 tsp bread soda

pinch salt

A handful of sunflower seeds

40g butter, melted

400ml butter milk

1 heaped desert sp molasses

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a 1lb loaf tin with butter. Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the buttermilk to the melted butter and pour into the bowl with the dry ingredients along with the molasses. Stir well. Pour into the tin and bake for 1hour or until a knife, inserted, comes out clean. Remove form the tin and allow to cool on a wire rack.