Mabon Buttermilk Bread

In celebration of autumn, I made some delicious homemade bread! This was actually my first time ever making bread from scratch without a bread machine. It's so much easier this way! I adapted this recipe from a British site, so these measurements may seem a bit different. You'll need:

3 mugs of bread flour (as in, a regular sized coffee mug)
500ml of buttermilk (roughly 2 cups)
2 tspn baking soda
Chopped dried fruit and spices of your choice

Quick note: If you cannot get buttermilk, you can simply use regular milk or soy milk and add lemon juice to it. A good rule of thumb is half a lemon per 1 cup of milk. After adding the juice, let the milk sit for 5 minutes before adding it to the dough. It will slightly curdle and give you perfect buttermilk.

Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl. For this loaf, I used dried apricots, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger. Slowly add the buttermilk a bit at a time. You may end up not needing the entire 2 cups. Keep adding and stirring until you have a moist dough that is easy to handle. Prep your baking sheet with a bit of oil and a dusting of flour. Place your ball of dough on the sheet and dust the top with more flour as you shape it into a nice dome. Bake at 350F for 45 minutes.
Although there's fruit in the loaf, this is not meant to be very sweet or served as a dessert. It is very much a hearty, dense, spicy  bread with fruit bits as an accent. This is perfect at brunch with butter or jam, or by itself as a snack.