Soda Bread

Baking is something which I enjoy and sporadically takes place in our house. When I do it now it more often than not involves my now turned 3 year old. It's fun for her and I've slowly learnt to not worry so much about how messy it gets. It's a good activity when the weather is bad or a break from whatever we are doing at the time. It's usually just a simple recipe to make it easier as baking with a child but also as we're not often stocked up on lots of exciting ingredients due to lack of funds.

My mother used to make us soda bread when we were little and seeing it being made on one of CBeeBies shows recently reminded me. That along side it's simplicity and it being budget friendly meant I decided to to make it in our next baking session.

Ingredients:

• 250g/6oz self-raising wholemeal flour
• 250g/6oz plain flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 435ml buttermilk

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/gas 6/fan 180C and dust a baking sheet with flour. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Pour in the buttermilk and mix it in quickly, then bring the dough together very lightly with your fingertips. Now shape it into a flat, round loaf.
2. Put the loaf on the baking sheet and score a deep cross in the top. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. If it isn’t ready after this time, turn it upside down on the baking sheet and bake for a few minutes more.
3. Transfer to a wire rack, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to cool.

I got my recipe from bbcgoodfood.com and changed it slightly to suit our needs.
I didn't have buttermilk so we used normal milk and stirred a couple of spoonfuls of lemon juice into it 5 minutes before using it. I also used white flour not wholemeal and left out the oats (not used in simple/ traditional soda bread recipe's) due to my health conditions. 
I altered the volume of milk to accommodate these changes.

Mixing

The recipe tells you to handle the mixture very gently but this wasn't going to be something I was worried about as I wanted G to get stuck in and experience it. She often can get funny about getting messy hands but enjoyed this part and the needing as well as the earlier mixing parts. 

Getting Stuck In

We used 450ml of milk and our dough was a bit too sticky and needed more flour so I have altered my recipe to 435ml milk for this post.

Lovely warm with jam

We had our bread warm, G tried hers with margerine and I had jam (which she's not a fan of). If you haven't tried it before I would suggest only eating it warm as it's much nicer then. It would be nice to make it again in the Winter.