A Dutch Oven Baking Day Outdoors Today & Butterflies

Since we are out of the extreme heat and humidity for a few days I planned today as a baking day outdoors in my 12 quart dutch oven.
  I had enough fresh lemons left over to make another lemon meringue pie-it was such a hit that I wanted to see if it would come out good again.  and it did maybe not as picture perfect as the last one but it tastes soooo good.
  This time instead of pecans for the crust I used walnuts we liked it either way.

  I also wanted to bake up a gluten free zucchini bread in my dutch oven over & under coals as well.

   Gluten free breads either yeasted or non like a quick bread are so difficult to get baked through-I don't understand the chemistry of all that-but is a real "pain" in my side lol
   I used the toothpick test and three times it came out clean, but I decided to bake it for the entire time-70 minutes, I needed to add more coals both top and bottom half way through. So glad I kept this in the entire time.

First photo going in the dutch oven

Second photo-the wind had picked up so I added another layer of red bricks for a wind break

The last 30 minutes especially I was keeping an eye on the bread checking every 10 minutes or so-making sure it did not get too brown on top-I ended up folding over on top of the pan a piece of parchment paper. I do that in the oven in the house as well-especially for gluten free cakes, breads.

    The next thing was the waiting-20 minutes rest in the pan, and then turn it out on a rack and let rest til cold before slicing-important for gluten free baked goods. 
    I just cut it in half and it does taste good, love the molasses in it and very moist and great flavor. I think I will freeze half of this loaf and eat the other half-will stay fresher that way.
    I used a recipe from King Arthur flour and instead of adding nuts and chocolate chips I added dried blueberries and raisins. They had our choice of molasses or honey I chose the molasses and for the brown sugar I used coconut sugar.

While sitting outdoors near the dutch oven set up-which is very close to my veggie garden-I enjoyed watching several butterflies-flying here and there. I caught a couple photos between the fence links
   What is fun now that I posted these photos; you can see the house and my sitting area in the blue globe. 
   The last photo is looking up at one of the oak trees to the sky. We have mostly oaks and hickory here in our woods.

So a really nice day today-also on the Weber grill I roasted a whole chicken--for some reason my coals went out on me-so it didn't get done til quite late for us-dinner for tomorrow night.  (all photos will enlarge more just click on them)

Happy Weekend everyone!