Secret Recipe Club #1: Killer Artichoke Bread

Who’s got two thumbs and joined the Secret Recipe Club this month? This gal, that’s who!

In case you’re not familiar with Secret Recipe Club, here’s how it works in a nutshell – each month, the SRC members are each randomly assigned a secret blogger buddy, and then pick a recipe from their buddy’s blog to cook and document on their own blog on the big reveal date. A few bloggers I follow have joined up in recent months, and it seemed like a neat way to connect with other bloggers while trying out some recipes I might otherwise never have discovered. Sounds like a win-win proposition, right?

My assigned blogger for September is Megan at Megan’s Cookin’, whose lovely blog is chock-full of recipes for homey comfort foods and sinfully sweet desserts.  It’s so chock-full, in fact, that I had a really hard time deciding which recipe I wanted to make!

With fall weather starting to sneak up on us, I was really tempted to try out her Pumpkin Pie Spiced Truffles or maybe the Sour Cream Pumpkin Coffeecake… and it was really hard to pass up the Bacon Candy, because I do love me some bacon.  And just check out how cute these little Turtle Cupcakes with Royal Icing Turtle Toppers are, despite a few hiccups that happened along the way (BTW, I completely admire any blogger who willingly shares their failures and even giggle a little at them. Believe me, we all have them… I just tend to keep mine quiet, is all.)

In the end, though, it was her recipe for Killer Artichoke Bread that called my name.  Actually, it didn’t really call my name… it just shouted something along the lines of “Bread! With loads of melted cheese! And artichokes! MAKE ME NOW!”.

(Yes, food occasionally screams orders at me.  Particularly when said food is deep-fried, smothered in cheese or involves some form of chocolate.)

The verdict? It’s awesome.

Seriously. Make this. NOW.

Do not, under any circumstances, eat the whole loaf on your own, no matter how loudly it is shouting at you to do so.  That would be bad.  I take no responsibility for any major indigestion, sudden spikes in cholesterol levels or massive weight gain that might result from actually eating the whole thing in one sitting, as tempting as it might be.  Consider yourself warned.

Instead, try inviting a friend or two or five to help you polish off these gorgeously gooey cheese-covered slices of heart-stopping, artery-clogging deliciousness.  Or just scale down the recipe to make a half-batch, which is what I ended up doing for The Boy and myself… and as it is, we ended up declaring defeat halfway through, and saved the second half for another day.

I didn’t make too many changes to Megan’s original recipe – besides scaling down to half of the topping ingredients (except for the garlic, because we LOVE garlic), I also swapped out the original French bread for a smaller ciabatta loaf and added one finely minced shallot to the mix. Here’s my ever-so-slightly adapted version:

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