I don’t really eat bread with a tan. I don’t really bake it either. However, I’m meant to be eating less white sliced pan and more seedy bread. Now, if you can’t find such a dodgy looking loaf loitering on a street corner near you you should give this recipe a go. It is actually healthy and as with many of my recipes it’s open to interpretation.

My husband bought two packets of seed things several months ago and I have some emergency dried apricot pieces and dried cranberries in the store for maggotfeatures. So that’s what I used to jazz up the plain soda bread recipe. You can use whatever randoms bits you have to hand. The original recipe, from the first Avoca cookbook, uses just white flour but I thought I could be even more impressively healthy by using mostly wholemeal flour.

I was all out of buttermilk too so I did the old full fat milk (400ml) with two tablespoons of white vinegar trick.

So that’s all.

Oven temperature 230 Celsius

Wholemeal flour                                300g

Plain flour                                           150g

Baking powder                                   1 teaspoon

Caster sugar                                        1 teaspoon

Salt                                                        1 teaspoon

Your additions – half a cup – I used pumpkin, sesame and poppy seeds and dried apricots and cranberries

Buttermilk (or milk and vinegar)    400ml

Preheat the oven. Find yourself a pound loaf tin and grease it with butter then add in a bit of flour and shake it all around to coat the tin as thoroughly as possible.

I question anyone who struggles with this recipe.

If you’re using the buttermilk substitute, measure out full fat milk and add in two tablespoons of vinegar. Stir and leave to one side.

Measure everything but the liquid into a bowl.

Mix.

Pour in the liquid.

Stir to form a thick, lumpy mess. Although, having said that, I have made this twice; the first time was quite dry and the second pretty runny. Both end results turned out just lovely.

Pour into the tin.

Sprinkle with some seeds if you want to show off.

Put into the oven. Bake for 20mins then turn the tin, so everything bakes evenly, and bake for another 10mins.

The bread should be well risen, fancy brown in colour and when you take it out of the tin and tap it on the bottom it should sound nice and hollow.