This Irish soda bread is just perfect for a hearty morning tea or an after-school snack for hungry kids. It is best eaten fresh, but leftovers (if you have any) are delicious thinly sliced, lightly toasted and topped with honey.

Ingredients:
4 cups plain flour
1 cup white sugar
1 tsp bicarb soda
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
500ml sour cream
2 tbsp buttermilk
1 cup currants (in a pinch I've used sultanas, but currants are best)
1 tsp caraway seeds - traditional, but optional (I never add them, I don't use them for anything else)

Method:
Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease two 20cm x 10cm loaf tins and line the bases with baking paper.  Mix the flour, sugar, bicarb soda, baking powder and salt. Add the eggs, sour cream, buttermilk, currants and caraway seeds. Mix until just combined. This will be a very thick, very lumpy batter. Distribute batter evenly between the two pans. Bake loaves for 1 hour or until nicely browned. Do not over bake. Best served immediately with butter.

​This Valentines Day say I Love You with some extra special  homemade biscuits, decorated especially for Valentines Day.

Use our Bargain Bikkies recipe, you'll get around 100 decent sized biscuits from this recipe for approximately $4.00.

Bargain Bikkies
Ingredients:
7 cups SR flour
2 cups sugar
500g margarine
4 eggs, beaten
1 dessertspoon vanilla essence

Method:
Cream butter and sugar until very light and fluffy. Mix vanilla essence with eggs and add to butter/sugar, mixing well. Add the flour. The mixture becomes quite stiff at this stage but make sure all the flour is thoroughly mixed in.

Now comes the fun part – creating different varieties of bikkies.
Divide the dough into portions – 4 is a manageable number – and flavour each portion.

Variations:
Cornflake:  Take spoonfuls (tea- or dessert- depending on how big you want them) of dough, roll into balls and then roll in crushed cornflakes. I have also used the Weetbix crumbs from the bottom of the box too.

Choc Chip: Mix ½ cup choc chips through the dough. Then either roll into balls and freeze or bake, or into a log.

Thumb Prints: Roll into balls, flatten out and then poke a dent in the middle of each bikkie with your thumb. Add a dollop of red jam.

Sultana: Mix through a handful of sultanas

Sugar Cookies:  Brush the tops of the biscuits with a little milk or beaten egg white and sprinkle generously with coloured sugar.  To make the coloured sugar just  put some sugar in a plastic bag and add food colouring, a drop at a time, massaging well into the sugar until the desired colour is reached.  

Apricot & Almond: Chop a few dried apricots and add with ¼ cup chopped almonds.

Cherryripe: Add a packet of glace cherries, 1/4 cup choc bits and 2 tbsp coconut.

Coconut & Cranberry:  Add 1/2 cup dessicated coconut and 1/2 cup Craisins to the mix. Roll into logs or shape into balls and flatten.

Bake in a moderate oven for 10 minutes or until golden. Watch with the choc chip variety that they don’t burn on the bottom – the chocolate melts and may catch on the tray.

Heart shaped cookie cutters will turn these biscuits into creations of love. Roll the dough out to about 5mm thick and use heart shaped cookie cutters to cut the biscuits. Kids don’t only like hearts. Let them experiment with other shapes in the cookie cutter arsenal if they want to. They can even design shapes of their own with the dough pieces that are too small to cut.

This mixture freezes really well. You can simply flash freeze the individual bikkies and then bag them, ready to bake. Or you can roll the mixture into logs and freeze. Then simply thaw a log, slice and bake.