Perfect for a Sunday afternoon

Straight out of the oven, with butter, this bread is very like a fruit scone and goes down brilliantly with a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. I’m also looking forward to it toasted, for breakfast. Either way it’s very quick to make.

I had bought some natural yogurt with the intention of making soda bread but I also had some sour milk so I used both. I’m still looking for uses for my pecans and a fruit and nut soda bread seemed like a good idea. As much as I’d love to make a pecan pie, I look at the ingredients (syrup, butter and pecans) and can’t quite bring myself to make it as I know I would end up eating the majority of it. Maybe next time I have some friends round for dinner…

Recipe

Ingredients

150g plain flour

150g wholemeal flour

25g butter

75g oats

50g sugar

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

65g raisins

50g pecans, chopped

150g natural yogurt

Around 200ml milk, sour if possible

Method

Set the oven to 180ºC and grease or flour a baking tray.

Put the flours into a large mixing bowl and rub in the butter.

Add all the other dry ingredients.

Mix the dry ingredients

Add the yogurt and enough milk to mix to a wet, but not liquid, dough.

Heap the dough onto the baking tray and bake for about 30-35 minutes, or until the base sounds hollow when tapped.

Soda bread dough ready to bake

Allow to cool a little if you can: this is delicious warm!

Soda bread

We have had a relatively quiet weekend as it is the beginning of the school holidays and I think we are all tired! I haven’t managed to do much running at all recently: a combination of the weather, daylight hours and working has meant that exercise has been put to the bottom of the list, but this weekend my daughter asked if she could go running with me. We only did a couple of miles as I’m not really sure that she should be running much further than that as a nearly teenager, and also because I wasn’t sure I could run much further than that! Unsurprisingly she seemed to find it a lot easier than I did but I’m sure we ran faster because we left as soon as the soda bread came out of the oven and it was still warm when we got back. Delicious!

Categories: Baking, Bread, Breakfast, Fruit, Recipes

Tags: baking, dried fruit, loaf, oats, pecans, raisins, recipe, soda bread, sour milk, yogurt