Homely-Spiced Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup with Confetti Cornbread

I'm very proud of tonight's culinary efforts- being all ingredient driven, giving me a smug make-do-and-mend feel. Due to a miscommunication when food shopping, we ended up with a glut of carrots, festering menacingly at the bottom of the fridge. We also had a bag of unused sweet potatoes which I was determined to use up before they met their mouldy end. Whilst I unfortunately would not have the ability to even comprehend peeling and chopping over a kilo of vegetables, a very rough chop with a large scary knife, something that gives me a worrying sense of safety in the kitchen, is perfectly do-able; even satisfying. The only way I could mask my embarrassing laziness and not peeling the carrots was to blend them with my nifty hand blender in a soup, and roasting the sweet potatoes in foil until the orange, fibrous flesh was practically begging to escape from its skin. To flavour this, I took the direction of homely, cakey spices and plenty of bay and thyme. They worked very well.
Sweet potatoes are something I have a certain ambivalence about: the very fibrous flesh is too sweet to be on its own, but that honey-sweetness and gorgeous sunset-orange colour goes a long way to liven up a potato mash, and in this soup it played its musky sweet role very well. The only thing I need to push is to not have the soup too thick, or it verges on eating a whole bowl of too-sweet mashed potato, and you need to add a bit of bite against that cloying sweetness, so don't be too light handed with the ginger, and spike the blended soup at the end with about 1 tbsp of apple cider vinegar.
The cornbread I served for dunking purposes with this is something I share an ambivalence about. I've tried it twice a long time ago before, once it was too dry and the next it was too cakey, unappetisingly pale and far too sweet. But this time it went very well. The bread itself is baked like a very easy cake batter, just mixing wet ingredients into dry, and the dry are cornmeal (known as polenta here) flour, sugar and raising agents, not yeast. Because of the texture of cornmeal, the finished bake is actually like an incredibly crumbly, but still light and airy bread you'd make with yeast. The flavour is also delicious, but if I kept it at just Paula Deen's original recipe (and yes, this is a Southern American staple, so cup measures here I'm afraid) it would be too sweet, so I add a confetti of freshly chopped red chilli and some cooked frozen sweetcorn. I was happy to put my fetching cup measure set, which I got for just £1.50 from Home Bargains, the ones that look like mini saucepans to good use, and it was very, very worth it.
1)Wrap 5 small sweet potatoes in foil, and bake at 200 degrees until very soft.
2)Roughly chop two large onions and about 1 kilo of carrots, and saute them for about 15 minutes. When they go very soft, add about 3cm of freshly grated ginger, that also doesn't need to be peeled, and 2 tsp ground allspice, ground cinnamon, about just 1 tsp of freshly grated nutmeg, a small pinch of cloves, 1 tbsp dried thyme and two bay leaves.
3)Add about 1 litre of vegetable stock, season with a little more salt, but do not overdo it. Bring to the boil, and simmer until the carrots are completely tender. Leave the sweet potatoes to cool, then peel them and throw in the soup. Blend very well with a hand blender, add more water if it's very thick, and 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar and some freshly ground pepper.
4)For the cornbread, combine 1 cup of cornmeal or polenta, 3/4 cup plain flour, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, and 1/2 tsp fine salt.
5)Combine the wet ingredients- the original recipe called for buttermilk, but I couldn't get that, but you can achieve the same effect with the same amount of milk curdled with some white vinegar. You need 1 1/2 cups, and whisk it with two eggs, 6 tbsp melted butter. Mix it well with the dry ingredients, plus two chopped chillis, the seeds left in one, and about 1/2 cup cooked sweetcorn. The batter will be a little lumpy. Pour into a greased 8 inch baking pan, and bake in a 180 degree oven for about 20 minutes, until crackled and golden. Turn out and serve warm with your soup.