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!

Rugelach

The new Tuesdays with Dorie project is to bake through Baking with Julia.  I'm still not officially finished with Baking from My Home to Yours, although I only have 13 left to bake.

This new group is just getting started and because these recipes tend to be a bit more complex and show-offy, we're doing two a month instead of one every week.  On the one hand, that doesn't seem like enough baking, and on the other hand, it gives me an opportunity to re-bake some of my favorites from Baking.


This  week's recipe was Rugelach and you can find the complete recipe at  Jessica of My Baking Heart or  Margaret of The Urban Hiker. 


I can't help but compare it to Dorie's Rugelach recipe in Baking:

BWJ:   butter and cream cheese dough that needed chilling

BFMHTY:  butter and cream cheese dough that needed chilling

BWJ:   cylinder shape, then cut into 1" pieces
BFMHTY:  triangles rolled into crescents

BWJ:   homemade apricot lekvar (easy and fun to make ...and very tasty)

BFMHTY:  apricot (or raspberry) preserves (also very tasty)

BWJ:   lovely variety of nuts

BFMHTY:  mostly pecans, because that's my favorite nut

BWJ:   options for dried fruit

BFMHTY:  options for dried fruit and encouragement to add chocolate!

BWJ:   egg wash then roll the rugelach in nut/sugar coating which conceals oozing of filling

BFMHTY:  egg wash and endeavor to keep filling from oozing out

BWJ:  large portion!

BFMHTY:  small portion to tempt you to eat more than one

BWJ:   delicious!

BFMHTY:  delicious!

A lovely assortment of nuts

Rolling this up might be a problem!

Not all that neat, but I didn't think it would matter.

Ready to bake.  

Just out of the oven with a little ooze.

Apricot preserves on the dough for the BFMHTY recipe

Filling

The crescent-shaped rugelach from BFMHTY

Two happy little rugelach.

The cheesecake, the rugelach to the right, and Dorie's Chocolate Walnut Teacakes in front.