Brown Soda Bread with Buckwheat Flour & Molasses

Soda bread has long been a staple in Ireland. It is a bread made without yeast, because baking soda mixed with buttermilk is used as a leavening agent. A cross is cut into the top of the bread to help it rise and, according to Irish folklore, to either ward off evil or let the fairies out.

Carrot-Orange Muffins for a Winter Morning

Hearty and robust or delicate and cake-like, all muffins have a place on the morning table. Homemade jams and preserves go well with full-flavored muffins, while the more subtle ones need only sweet butter, a little crème fraîche, or perhaps a spoonful of jelly. Some muffins filled with berries, need no accompaniment at all.

Oat Breakfast Cakes with Three Different Seeds, Cashew Nuts & Dried Berries

These nutty, golden oat breakfast cakes are filling, not too sweet and very healthy. I just love them with my coffee in the morning. Experiment with whatever seeds, nuts and dried berries you have on your shelf.

Sesame Oat Square Bars with Pear Compote

Some things always turn out well, including these wonderful little desserts - Sesame Oat Square Bars with Pear Compote. This healthy version uses the coconut oil and no eggs. Excellent treats/snacks for any time of day. Enjoy and have a good weekend!

Oat Bread

"All life moving to one measure - Daily bread."
W.W.Gibson

Few notes of the bread-making art: There are several kinds of yeast. Compressed yeast, which is quicker-acting than the dried yeast, must be kept in a cool place or it will spoil. The liquids used in bread-making are water, milk, or sometimes, potato water. Sweetening is usually added to bread. This can be either sugar, honey or sometimes molasses. For good flavor and texture use butter for bread dough. Temperature for rising and oven temperature are exceedingly important. It is truly a laboratory process to make bread correctly. The finished product should be an even-sized, medium-brown loaf with a good crust and fine grain, not lumpy.

Healthy Banana-Carrot Cake with Blackberries (no sugar, no butter)

Leonie de Sounin says of the carrot in her delightful book Magic in Herbs:

"So delicate is this vegetable that it is predestined by nature just to be taken from its cool ground and eaten right on the spot, crisp and fresh. Yet if you take it home and cook it, then please don't scrape this lovable rosy thing of charm. Just place it in a little boiling water. After a while the skin comes off easily and the carrot underneath looks just as alluring as in its original state."



Ingredients:

• 2 banana, large and ripe

• 3 eggs

• 3/4 cup almond milk

• 1/2 cup brown rice flour
• 1 cup oats
 
• a pinch of salt
 
• a pinch of saffron

• 2 carrots, shredded

• 1 cup walnuts, ground
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 Tbsp chia seeds (optional)
• 2 Tbsp coconut oil + more for the tartlets
• roasted almonds for serving
• blackberries with syrup for serving
• apricot jam for top (optional)

Direction:

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Mash the bananas with a fork, add the eggs and coconut oil and whisk together. Add almond milk, brown rice flour, oats, chia seeds, vanilla, salt and saffron and stir around. Shred the carrots and ground the walnuts, add to the mixture and stir around.



Grease the inside of 2 large 8-inch tartlet tins with coconut oil. Pour the batter into the tins and bake for about 30 minutes. Serve the cakes while they are warm, together with blackberries  and roaster almonds.

Tip: If you like the cake to be a little sweeter, brush the top of the cake with a warm apricot jam.



Happy Spring!

Irish Soda Bread - St. Patrick's Day Favorites

Irish Soda Bread is the popular brown bread in Irish country homes, although slices white bread now appears in waxed-paper wrappers in Dublin and other towns.
The whole-wheat flour is stone ground, and baking soda, and sour milk are used to lighten it.
Every farmer's wife had to make butter almost every day, for it was one of the main cash crops. There was always buttermilk from the churning, and it was the family drink and handy for the baking.
When baking soda mixed with sour milk or buttermilk, gas is formed and the heat of the oven makes the gas bubbles expand in a way similar to the action of east.

Maggie Murphy's pot oven bread

Down yonder in one of our big fields is a lovely mysterious ruin of an old house and grist mill - moss-covered stone walls, roof fallen in over a perfectly arched stone doorway - and at one end this relic of the past is a tiny two-room cottage that was once the miller's cottage. There, almost fourscore years ago, Maggie Murphy first saw the light of day, and there she will live out all the days that are left to her.
Spray as a cricket, she bicycles the five miles into the village once a week and peddles back (uphill most of the way) with whole-wheat flour among her purchases.
She cooks over an open hearth fire and mixes her soda bread, but she has no oven - just a three legged iron pot oven. She sets this right in the red-hot coals on her hearth, rubs it inside with a bit of fat pork, drops her cake of whole-wheat dough onto it, puts on the cover and then shovels some of the red coals onto the corner. Heat top and bottom she then has, and the bread bakes for an hour while show sits by the hearth, from time to time turning the handle on her wheel bellows - which makes a draft of air come up through the tiny hole under the coals, bringing them to life with a golden glow.
At just the right minute she brushes the hot coals off the cover, lowers the crane to catch the handle of the pot and swings it out away from the fire.
Out comes a perfectly baked, crusty loaf, fragrant and golden "and good enough for the likes of me," says Maggie Murphy.

from Pepperidge Farm Cookbook 1963



Adapted from Williams-Sonoma

Sometimes soda bread is made of all whole wheat and sometimes with part whole wheat and part white. Here, yogurt has been used in place of the buttermilk and rolled oats have been added for a bit more texture.

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups bread flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/4 cup wheat bran
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 4 Tbs. (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1 1/2 cups plain yogurt

Directions:

Preheat an oven to 425°F. Place a baking sheet in the oven to preheat.

In a large bowl, stir together the flour, oats, bran, baking soda and salt. Using a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the yogurt and stir to blend, forming a rough ball. The dough will start rising as soon as the baking soda comes in contact with the yogurt, so work quickly to form the dough.



Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead gently for about 30 seconds. The dough should feel soft to the touch. Dust a clean work surface with flour and set the ball of dough on it. Flatten slightly into a 7-inch dome and sprinkle with flour, spreading the flour lightly over the surface. Using a sharp knife, cut a shallow X in the loaf from one side to the other. Transfer the loaf to the preheated baking sheet.



Bake until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool slightly. Serve warm. Any leftover bread can be stored in an airtight container for up to 2 days. Makes 1 loaf.

P.S. I got so hungry during the photo shoot, so after I made a big salad with soft boil egg and the Irish bread . My lunch was perfect!