Unlucky Leprechaun

I like holidays and celebrations just as much as the next person but I’m not much into the whole hoopla.  Sure, I try to have a Christmas tree at Christmas, and it makes me feel something tingly inside when I see the snowflakes light and sing Carol of the Bells on the side of Sak’s Fifth Avenue, but as far as holidays go I don’t go terribly out of my way with decorations or personal displays.  You may catch me making a holiday craft or two but you’re unlikely to find me wearing red on Valentine’s day, sporting patriotic colors on the fourth, or wearing one of those fantastically festive Christmas sweaters with the little lights poking through anytime in the near future.  What you will consistently find is that I will have red velvet on Valentine’s day, roasts near Christmas and a pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.  I express my festive side through food and I find a great amount of joy and celebration in it.  Sure, many holiday foods are things that you could make all year long but you don’t and that’s part of the charm- the novelty factor.  This is why I was looking forward to a Guinness with some Irish Soda Bread on St. Patrick’s Day. 

 

Seeing as this once religious holiday fell on a weekday this year, I didn’t anticipate any pub crawls or day drinking and had great expectations for the soda bread I would soberly bake and bring to work.  Once I allowed the memories of last year’s bread to commence floating in my head my excitement grew.  Then I recalled how easy it had been!  At the time I declared it the easiest yet most delicious baking I had ever done.  I mixed some things (most of which I already had on hand) into a bowl, plopped the resulting blob onto a tray, and in no time at all I had this perfect, golden, crusty, buttery, raisin filled bread. 

 

Well, friends, things went amiss and since I always brag about the good and brilliant things that I do I will also share with you some failures.  I was really determined to get this thing up for you in plenty of time for you to prepare to make it on St. Patrick’s Day when it happened.  Something both unexpected and unpleasant came up and I had to go out of town when I had planned to bake and photograph.  I decided to tackle it late on the Monday night I got back thinking that baking would somehow be therapeutic.  Have I mentioned that baking is rarely a positive experience for me?  Needless to say baking late on a Monday while hoping for enlightenment was an especially terrible idea.  Unfortunately, for all of us, I was too deep in denial to acknowledge these obvious problems. 

 

I pulled up my mom’s recipe from last year.  It is generous of me to call it a “recipe.”  It was as I had remembered it; more like a list of random ingredients with no instruction.  I love my mother, really I do, but she is not one for details which can be incredibly frustrating particularly in regards to baking. This was the entire body of the email in which she sent said recipe:

 

3 c flour
1/2 c sugar
1 tbs baking powder
1 tsp.baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
4 tbs unsalted butter
1 c raisins
1 egg
1 c buttermilk

preheat oven to 400

Bake 10 mins and check to make sure it’s not burning. I will be making this week.  I will let you know.  Call me.

 

Then lower to 350 and bake  15-20 mins

Form into 2 circles on a cookie sheet

 

OK, so it wasn’t perfect.  It didn’t specify in what order you should mix things together.  I’m wasn’t really sure how to cut in the butter and there was a random not so subliminal message in the middle of it reminding me to call my mother.  Still, by my mother’s standards of emailing and recipe sharing this was pretty coherent.  Somehow I got on with it last year and produced two perfectly satisfying rounds of bread.  Why should this year be different?

 

I got to it, dry ingredients first but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to thoroughly whisk them together before adding the buttermilk so there were ugly clumps of ingredients which I didn’t notice at the time.  Ah, the buttermilk.  I hate waste and I didn’t see myself finishing up a carton of buttermilk anytime in the near future so I made my own from lemon juice and milk.  I do this a lot so I didn’t foresee any trouble except that I accidentally got a lot of lemon seeds into the milk.  I planned on straining them out before pouring the buttermilk into the dry mixture but I forgot.  By my best estimations there were no fewer than six seeds in the bread.  

 

When it came time to cut in the butter I realized I didn’t have any.  What I did have was some artificial butter like spread stolen from my roommate.  I cut it in but it was mushy and weird and turned my dough bright yellow.  I pretended not to notice and got straight to baking in an attempt to get my mess of a night over with.

 

Ten minutes my bum.  It took at least 45 to bake through and even then it didn’t rise or brown or do anything remotely interesting or tasty looking.  What was infuriatingly interesting was an overwhelming gas smell caused by my miserable oven.  By this point I was getting pretty miserable myself.  I promptly removed the disasters from the oven circa midnight and my first bite was mediocre at very best.  Bite two was a mouthful of baking soda.  Bite three happened the next morning and was chewy as a fat wad because in my impatience I put it away warm and all sorts of moisture had collected.  I didn’t have the mental or psychological strength to accept failure and throw it out so it sat on the counter for several days before bite four landed it in the trash.

 

A few days later while I was watching Martha, she announced that she created and perfected her own recipe for Irish Soda Bread.  Surely, this was the answer.  She soured her own version of buttermilk with apple cider vinegar- I was on board with this.  Then she busted out some caraway seeds and suspicion crept up on me.  Lots of raisins- back on board.  Late Saturday night (my social life is that good sometimes) I decided to give Martha a try.  This woman rarely lets me down.  In the interest of making things as difficult as humanly possible, I went to the grocery store without the recipe.  I bought the real imported Irish butter that she had insisted on.  I then remembered the caraway seeds and hesitantly threw them in my basket.  Upon arriving home I consulted the recipe and wondered why there was wheat bran in it.  For a moment I contemplated substituting wheat germ but then I decided that I didn’t want wheat anything in my soda bread.   Screw Martha.

 

Epicurious, here I come.  Let’s do this.  I picked a highly rated recipe also with caraway seeds because why not, I’d already bought them.  5 cups of flour.  Hmmm, this is at least two cups more than EVERY other recipe.  I whisked all the dry ingredients together really well and strangely, I found some solace in the activity.  Three tablespoons of caraway seeds seemed like a lot but it was nothing compared to Martha’s 1/4 cup.  I settled on two.  The recipe called for the bread to be baked in a high sided skillet and there was something about this idea that was very appealing to me so I buttered that baby up.  The dough looked good and I set it to bake unaware at the time that I was sacrificing it to my oven.  It smelt good- the bread smell was overriding the gas smell which is a really good sign.  An hour and fifteen minutes seemed like a long time to me but seeing as my oven took nearly three hours to bake a few cupcakes last weekend I wasn’t that concerned.  I didn’t dare open the oven at for fear of lowering the temperature and causing it to take even longer. 

 

Around an hour and ten minutes I realized the smell had turned from sweet to charred.  I opened the oven and the top of the bread was GOLD-en BAH-rown.  I immediately removed it from the oven but not before burning myself with the skillet handle.  When I lifted it out the entire bottom was, as I expected: burnt black.  I muttered several obscenities before cutting off the top and eating a cakey, doughy, dense wedge.  Texture fail.  It was too smooth and lacking that delicious crunchy crumble.  I don’t like doughnuts and this tasted like a giant one laced Rye bread droppings.

 

I have a really hard time admitting defeat yet I have an even harder time letting go.  This is why I didn’t just toss the whole mess in the trash and get on with my life.  Instead I’ve let it torture me, sitting there tightly wrapped in tin foil, on my kitchen counter for five days as a daily reminder of what could have been.  Each day I pick the top bits off and while they’re not terrible, they’re not getting any better.  Today I will release my failure and pitch that crap.  Ideally, I will let out a lion’s roar before throwing it into a fire wind, watching it swirl and spin and violently slam into walls before spontaneous combustion occurs and transforms it into a heaping pile of ash gently settling into the garbage bin.

 

Maybe the third time will be lucky?  I’ll practice and get back to you next year.  I might retry my mom’s recipe now that I have a better understanding of the process.  I haven’t been this disappointed in a St.Patrick’s day since my friend puked up her green bagels all over our fifth grade hallway.  At least this time I can settle for some Guinness instead of a carton of green milk.