More baking

I have a loaf of Irish Soda Bread in the oven, in honor of St. Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the recipe (a chronic habit) and swapped the amounts of leavening, then tried to compensate by haphazardly scooping out baking soda. I just peeked in the oven and it looks sort of flat and craggy. We'll see. At least I have three more days until real St. Patrick's Day. I can always try again.

After a zombielike week of fighting off a cold and having zero motivation to do anything useful, I went on an organizing mini-binge this weekend. I'm cleaning out my baking pantry right now. I am appalled at the amount of food that I've wasted by shoving it in there and forgetting about it for years. So far I have thrown out a box of cake mix from 2005 (although I'm actually a little proud that I haven't baked from a mix for at least 5 years -- probably several years longer, since I used to keep cake mix on hand in case of emergency), two packages of marshmallows that expired in 2006, a small bag of hazelnuts that expired in 2008, and some horribly rancid sunflower seeds that my mom bought when she came to stay with us after K was born. I'm organizing the rest into categories (decorating, sweet baking ingredients, bread baking ingredients, flours, sugars, gelatin/custard, etc.) and I have a "use immediately" box which currently contains chickpea flour, cocoa, several chocolate items, some sweetened coconut, another bag of undated hazelnuts, some sliced almonds, and a crystallized quarter-full honey bear. Once I'm done culling, I will make some horrible concoction. I keep hearing about Compost Cookies lately, but they seem like a waste of butter for a bunch of stale ingredients.

Update: Soda bread wasn't quite what I was expecting -- more light and cakelike, not a strong soda taste, and my addition of fennel seeds gave it a pleasant but un-Irish taste -- but good nonetheless. K, ever polite, said, "What a beautiful cake!" In fact, if I swapped out the AP flour for cake flour, and maybe added some lemon zest along with the fennel, I bet it would make a good cake. A hearty, everyday, at-home kind of cake, not an occasion cake. (Other changes: left out 1T of sugar, and used brown sugar instead of white; subbed 1 cup whole wheat flour for AP flour; used 2/3 cup of K's old milk from the morning plus 1/3 cup of water plus 3T buttermilk powder in place of 1 cup buttermilk.)