Irish Soda Fail

Today my family went to the Renaissance Faire while I stayed home to catch up on some chores.  It's the Highland celebration this weekend, so I thought it would be nice to bake a nice Irish Soda Bread to include in my parents' lunch tomorrow.  I'm not sure if I can serve this one, though. The recipe wasn't bad, the texture came out real nice, but I dun goofed on measuring the salt--I put 1 tablespoon instead of 1 teaspoon.  The whole thing tastes like a mall pretzel.  But I'm pretty sure with the right amount of salt it would be pretty tasty, so I'll post the recipe I used here--for posterity, if anything, as I may try again with it on a later date.

The ingredients i used may seem a bit unorthodox if you're familiar with the traditional recipes of irish soda bread.  It's the end of the week so the cupboard is a bit bare. Being completely out of milk and eggs, I searched for a vegan recipe and found this one from Hellyeahitsvegan.com.  Of course, I was still missing some of those ingredients but I made do with what I had.  Here's my adaptation:

INGREDIENTS:

1.5 cups Rice Milk
1.5 tablespoons vinegar
4 cups all purpose flour (plus more for kneading)
0.5 cups sugar
2 tablespoons baking soda
1 TEASPOON salt
4 tablespoons of butter



DIRECTIONS:
preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.  In a small bowl combine rice milk and vinegar and let it sit while you work on the next few steps.  In a much larger bowl, sift together flour, sugar, soda, and the TEASPOON of salt.  Use a pastry cutter to incorporate the butter into the flour mixture.

 create a well with the flour mixture and pour the ricemilk mixture into the center.  Give it a bit of a stir with a big spoon so that everything is just incorporated before you dump it out onto a large floured surface. I found the dough to be a bit of a big wet mess so I dumped a bunch of extra flour on it before I started kneading. Knead the dough as little as possible, then plop it onto your parchment lined cookie sheet.

 With a serrated knife, make a big X across the surface of the dough.  Put the pan in the oven and bake for around 35 or 40 minutes. It should come out looking like this:

 Let cool a bit before you dig into it.

Next time I bake this I will most likely use real milk, but probably any unsweetened nondairy milk would work if you like to keep things veg (in which case you'll want to sub some earth balance or whatever in place of the real butter but i suppose that's a given).