I don't very often make yeast bread for one reason, the beautiful and therapeutic experience of kneading dough seems to me far to much like hard work and I don't own a food mixer.

However I often make soda bread and I have had the good fortune that my mother has made brown soda bread for the family all my life.

I usually make white soda bread or Spot of Dog (with raisons) for the simple reason that I only ever seem to have white flour in the house. Soda bread is the sort of thing that the first few times, no matter how carefully you follow the recipe, it doesn't work out as well as you want then with practice, you wonder what you ever did wrong as you won't even have to open the book, you'll just bung the ingredients in the bowl and it will come out pretty near perfect every time.

Neither I nor my mother follows any recipe particularly carefully - mainly because we don't have a weighing scale!