Welcome!

Welcome to my bread (and sundry other baked goods) blog! I found myself looking for another project and a way to keep myself motivated in my quest to make better bread, and I thought that posting my successes, failures, and lessons learned in a blog with pretty pictures would help to keep me on task. I've been baking bread for about six years, but only sporadically and not always successfully. I recently decided to try to learn better techniques so that my output would be more consistently edible. I'm also hoping to take breadmaking from an idle hobby to something that actually supplements my weekly shopping.

I thought it would be fitting to start my baking blog with a photo of one of my favorite loaves of bread, and one I've been making successfully since I was about ten years old.  This is my dad's Irish Soda Bread, the recipe for which he got from a King Arther flour advertising insert in the Boston Globe in the 1970's.  We've used the recipe so often and spilled so much on it that we've had to photocopy it multiple times, but my dad still has the old crackled newspaper insert somewhere.  The loaf weighs more than my cat, is full of buttermilk and other fattening goodies, and is divine for breakfast.  It is sweet with raisins and caraway seeds, and tastes great plain or toasted with butter.  It's also really easy to tinker with the recipe to make it healthier or to give it a richer flavor.  I often make it with half whole wheat flour and substitute currants for the raisins, which gives it a less sweet and more earthy taste.  But the original is still the best, and we always eat it at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and St. Patrick's Day.  I know that some Irish-American families associate soda bread with wakes and funerals, but I'm lucky that that tradition never made it to my parents' generation.  It would be awful to have to wait for someone to die to eat this delicious bread!