Fail

Not everything I make turns out okay. Last week I had a number of failures. Take, for instance, the banana bread I made. The recipe seemed promising since it had almost 4,000 reviews on allrecipes.com. With 4.5 stars, I figured it was going to be good. A red flag went off for me when I read the recipe and saw no vanilla (come on, this is a baked good!), no cinnamon, no nutmeg, no spices at all. This recipe also called for a ridiculous amount of bananas. I ended up using over five bananas in this bread. I had a feeling the bread would have some texture issues, but I baked on anyway. Long story short, this bread was flat, gummy, and without much flavor. I even threw in some vanilla and cinnamon just because it felt right, and it still turned out sort of blah. There were way too many bananas and they just sunk to the bottom of the bread, making a weird sort of mashed banana layer. I suppose this all could have been user error, but really, no vanilla?

My second bad experience was with some oatmeal raisin cookies. I was in a hurry so I pulled the butter out of the fridge and microwaved it for 15 seconds. It was a good consistency at this point (soft, not melted) so I went forward with the cookies. I creamed together the butter and brown sugar and went to move on to the next step. It was then I realized that I still had to add white sugar. So, I added the white sugar and creamed it some more. This was a mistake, as my butter became more liquidy. By the time I added the other ingredients the butter seemed to be melted. My cookies spread in weird shapes and ended up crispy. Boo. This is my go-to oatmeal raisin recipe, so it was definitely user error.

Learn from my mistakes. Shy away from any baked good recipe without vanilla (unless there is some other sort of extract) and don't over-beat the butter.

Irish Soda Bread

I know it's a bit late, but I finally made Irish Soda bread. Everything I read said that real Irish Soda Bread does not contain caraway seeds or raisins--which is good because I don't have any. Although I will need to pick up some raisins if I want to make Faux Tagine Chicken, but that's another post for another day. If you want a few more Irish Soda Bread recipes, check out this site. It was pretty neat and very informative. And I know that this isn't really an authentic Irish Soda Bread, but I had all the ingredients for this one.

I started with this simple recipe:

• 4 cups of flour
  
• 4 tablespoons white sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup margarine, softened
• 1 cup buttermilk--I didn't have any buttermilk so I used the old vinegar trick
  
• 1 egg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix the dry ingredients. Then unlike me, add the margarine. Stir in the buttermilk and egg until a big sticky ball is made. Put on a floured surface, knead a few times. Put dough in to a greased iron skillet. Cut a cross in to the dough. Let it bake for 40-50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.



I really suggest adding the margarine. My dough was really dry and didn't take all the flour. I threw away probably about 1/2 cup of flour. It turned out like a big, dense biscuit that had a vague bacon flavor--I blame the cast iron skillet. It did have a nice crust about it. I smeared it with butter and honey; it was fine. I would suggest making the dough spread out in the skillet as much as possible-punching it in there or shaping it the right size before putting it in would work as well.