When I was a little girl, my grandmother taught me to make my biscuit dough into a "pone" as she called it. What she was teaching me to do was to shape the dough into a round mounded form, and then bake it that way rather than cutting it into individual biscuits.

I thought this Irish Soda Bread recipe would work well baked that way, and it did.

Ingredients

• 3 cups flour
• 3 tsp. brown sugar (white sugar or Splenda may be used if desired)
• 3 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. coarse salt (use regular table salt if you don't have coarse salt on hand)
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1 cup raisins (optional, but recommended)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Spread butter on a cookie sheet in a good sized circle (about eight or nine inches in diameter).

Measure all of the dry ingredients into a good sized bowl; stir together very well with a fork.

If you are going to use raisins, mix them in at this point (after mixing the dry ingredients well).

Gradually add one cup of buttermilk, stirring only until mixed.

If the dough is crumbly, continue adding more buttermilk until the dough is sticking together into a nice ball.

Now, it is very important with this kind of bread that you not overmix the dough, otherwise it will become tough after it has baked. Just mix it until the dry ingredients are all moistened, and the dough is holding together in a ball.

You will not be kneading this dough, what you will do instead is pick up the bowl and let the dough ball plop out into your hand. Grab a bit of flour with the other hand and gently pat it on the dough and just sort of lightly toss the dough around in your hands to loosely form it into a ball, grabbing a bit of flour and patting it on as you go to reduce stickiness on the outside.

When the dough has formed into a nice ball and is not sticky on the outside, put it down gently on your cookie sheet.

Gently pat the dough a bit so that it forms a mound about six inches in diamter on the cookie sheet -- higher in the middle than on the sides but not sitting there like a ball; just a sloping mound.

Sprinkle a bit of extra flour around on the top, mostly just to make it look nice after it has baked.

Bake for 45 minutes in your preheated oven, or until the pone has nicely browned.

Serve immediate, if possible. If you can't serve it immediately, keep it warm in a towel or in a handknit biscuit blanket.

As an alternative, you could leave out the raisins and put in one cup of grated cheddar cheese. Or, you might want to season it with rosemary or something like that.

Enjoy!