Irish Soda Bread Recipe

It’s getting near St Patrick’s Day and all of the inspiring posts I shared this week on Tuesday Tots with St Patrick’s Day Activities for Tots got me in the mood to make some Irish Soda Bread with T this week. Such a simple recipe to make and even though we had to make our own buttermilk to make it it tasted delicious and T and I enjoyed our Irish Soda Bread for lunch warm with butter and home made blackberry jam from the autumn.

Irish Soda Bread Recipe

6oz of Self Raising Flour
6oz of Plain Flour
1/2 tsp of salt
1/2 tsp of Baking Soda
1/2 pint of full fat Milk
1/2 tsp of lemon juice

Making the Irish Soda Bread

I started off by turning our milk into “buttermilk” by mixing the full fat milk with the lemon juice – this creates a great substitute for buttermilk when you don’t have any to hand. Switch the oven on to 200C to heat up and line a baking tray with some grease proof paper. Leaving those on the side T and I got to measuring out our ingredients and added all the dry ingredients to a bowl and mixed it up.

We then poured in the milk/lemon juice and mixed it up – it’s a very sticky dough and we added a bit more flour to make it a little less sticky and then turned it out and I got kneading with T to get a dough made to go in the oven.

We shaped it into a fairly round shape and cut a cross in the top – every recipe that I looked at had a cross being part of the process and then I searched more – the baking reason behind the cross is that the heat can get into the centre of the bread – the folk tales is that it is a sign for the fairies to protect the soda bread as it bakes. We then put it on the baking tray and into the oven for 30 minutes.

We let the bread cool down a little and then had it with butter and jam for lunch – a perfect St Patrick’s Day lunch for you and your toddler to make together and then enjoy together.