Irish Soda Bread and Unbelievably Good Chocolate Blueberry Blueberry Ice Cream for the First day of Spring

I've always been underwhelmed by Irish Soda Bread.  I guess it's because I expect something called BREAD will either taste yeasty like a nice, crusty loaf  or it will be  moist and flavorful like banana bread.

This week's Tuesday's with Dorie pick was Irish Soda Bread.  Carla of Chocolate Moosey and Cathy of My Culinary Mission are the hosts and the recipe is available on their blogs.

Quick and easy to make, this bread is tender and flavorful due to the buttermilk. I thought I had enough buttermilk for the recipe, butI didn't have quite as much buttermilk as was needed so I used some milk and yogurt.  The texture was soft and the bread tasty.  It was rather like a big biscuit!  We ate the first slices with cherry preserves for brunch and had the rest for dinner with soup.  I don't know whether or not it was good the next day because there was none left!

The dry ingredients.

Ready to go into the oven.

The last few slices to accompany our soup.

For me, a more certain sign of spring than the Irish Soda Bread was Dorie's Unbelievably Good Chocolate Blueberry Ice Cream from Baking from My Home to Yours.  

When my kids were small, we started a tradition of  having ice cream sundaes for breakfast on the first day of spring.  My boys thought this was an absolutely amazing tradition!  Now that they're grown, I still have a little dish of ice cream for breakfast on the first day of spring.  This year I made Dorie's Unbelievably Good Chocolate Blueberry Ice Cream--and it was!  Happy Spring!

Chilling the custard

Stirring in the blueberry preserves

My little ice cream sundae with blooming daffodils!  We are having a very early spring!