Monday, September 30, 2013

Irish Tea Cake

I should start by apologizing for my absence of new posts lately.  A lot has happened since my last update and this post is long overdue.  I am going with the theory of "better late than never" on this one.  But let me back up and explain from the beginning...

About two months ago I received an e-mail inviting me to participate in a "virtual baby shower" for Jessica of Sunny Side Up.  A virtual baby shower is when a "host" blogger reaches out to a group of other bloggers and assigns a theme for the "shower" and a date for their blog post to go live.  Essentially everyone invited makes a dish that they would bring if they were invited to a real baby shower but instead they blog about it.  I was excited to participate because A) I had never participated in a virtual shower before and I had always wanted to be involved in one and B) Jessica and I had become "labor buddies".  She was due 15 days before me and although we met originally through a cooking message board over a year ago, we ended up on the same pregnancy board so we paired up to talk about everything we were going through.

The date for the shower was August 27th.  With everything going on between the move and preparing for our baby, I had set aside the morning of August 25th to bake my contribution.  And then that morning rolled around, and SURPRISE!!  My water broke!  So instead of doing something to celebrate Jessica's baby, I ended up with one of my own!



So as you could guess, the last month has been quite busy.  We're finally getting a hang of this parenthood stuff and I was able to get back into the kitchen this weekend and bake.  The first thing I wanted to do was to actually make my baby shower dish since we were actually looking forward to eating this one and were a little disappointed we missed out last month.

The theme of Jessica's shower was to make something Irish, to celebrate her daughter Maeve.  After some Googling, I found this recipe for Irish Tea Cake.  It is a super simple recipe, and doesn't take much time at all to prepare.  And best of all, I had all of the ingredients in my pantry already!  I think that this is the perfect treat for any daytime party (such as a shower) or when you have company over for tea (or coffee).  This might end up as my go-to dish when I want to have something around the house or to bring to a friend's house for a visit.

You can check out the full shower "menu" at Jessica's blog here and be sure to check out her latest blog post to see baby Maeve, who arrived on September 3rd (and is quite the little cutie!).


 
Irish Tea Cake (slightly adapted from Allrecipes.com)

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter; softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
confectioners' sugar for dusting


Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour a 9 inch round pan.
- With your mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Beat in the eggs (one at a time), then stir in the vanilla.
- In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt.  Stir into the batter in small amounts, ,alternating with milk.  If the batter is too stiff, a tablespoon or two of milk may be added.
- Spread the batter evenly into the prepared pan.
- Bake for 30-35 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
- Cool in pan on a wire rack, then turn out onto a serving plate.
- Dust with confectioners' sugar right before serving.