Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Irish Soda Bread. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post. The original recipe was found in the Cooking With Pryde cookbook by Pressley Ridge.

Robyn’s Take:

PLEASE NOTE: NANCE’S PART OF THIS POST WILL BE UP, HOPEFULLY, LATER TODAY. Since it’s an Irish-themed recipe, we wanted to get at least part of it published today in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

This week’s recipe was another one that Nance found in that old cookbook she’s got,  Cooking with Pryde. I’m in charge of scheduling the recipes, so I scheduled it for today, figuring this would be the perfect day for it.

HAPPY ST. YOU DAY, PATRICK!!!

I’m pretty sure that I’d never heard of Irish Soda Bread before, but in the last few days, I’ve gotten two recipes for it in my email. Neither of those recipes resembled the other – or the one I’m doing today – much at all, aside from the name, and the fact that there’s baking soda somewhere in the recipe.

If I were the sort of gal to have my act together, I’d have made a New England Boiled Dinner (corned beef, cabbage, assorted vegetables) and served this bread with it, to get the whole Irish experience and to have excellent pictures to tease y’all with. However, we only have corned beef and cabbage once a year, because Fred is some sort of freak who thinks that boiled meat is “gross.” (And then he elbows me out of the way to get to the corned beef, because he is strong in his beliefs.) So I will be making corned beef and cabbage for dinner later today, but I will not be taking pictures of it, unless I decide to do so for a post for NEXT year. (Don’t hold your breath.)

So, Irish Soda Bread. Here we go – your ingredients:

Flour, sugar, salt, baking soda (THUS THE NAME), eggs, buttermilk, melted butter. The recipe lists raisins as an optional ingredient. I opted O HELL NO, because I am no fan of raisins. In my life, there are very limited areas where raisins are acceptable. These places are: cereal. And that’s it. I don’t want raisins in my bread, and I sure as shit don’t want raisins in my cookies. Haven’t we all thought we were getting a chocolate chip cookie, only to realize that those were NOT chocolate chips, they were RAISINS? Blech. That right there is a scarring experience. Scarred FOR LIFE, I was.

If you want to put raisins in your bread, you feel free to do so. Just don’t invite me over for dinner.

First, grease and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.

Usually I use baking spray on cake pans, but I decided to go OLD SKOOL, and actually greased and floured the pan.

This is one of those simple recipes where you sift your dry ingredients together, mix your wet ingredients together, and then dump your wet ingredients into your dry and mix ’em up.

I imagine that you COULD use a hand mixer to mix everything, but I used a big spoon to do it, and just when I thought that the dough was going to be too dry, all of a sudden it came together.

And I thought “That’s kind of a wetter dough than I was expecting.”

My first reaction was to think of adding more flour to the mix, but I decided to just go with it as it was, and see what I ended up with. I dumped it into the cake pan.

You’re supposed to cut a cross into the top of the dough, but – did I mention that it was a pretty wet dough? I cut a cross the best that I could, not that you can really see it.

On a side note, I read that cutting a cross in the top of the dough wards off evil spirits, but since I feed and scoop the litter boxes of a dozen evil spirits every day, I didn’t think a cross in the top of the bread would do much to banish them, so I wasn’t too hopeful.

The bread was supposed to bake for an hour, but when I glanced at it after 55 minutes, it already looked a little overdone, so I took it out.

Fred thought it looked like a giant biscuit.

I let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then put it on the wire rack to let it cool completely. Then I cut it in half and cut a wedge to give it a try.

The verdict? It was a nice chewy, dense bread. If I were in the mood for a slightly sweet bread, I’d likely make a loaf of this because it was really easy to make. I think it’ll be good sliced and toasted, with a little butter on it. Fred agreed with my assessment. I might even start making it every year to go with the corned beef and cabbage!

Edited to add: I made this again for St. Patrick’s Day 2015, baked it for 45 minutes, and it was even better!

Kiss him, he’s Irish.

Nance’s Take:

TO BE ADDED LATER TODAY.