My Long Awaited Taste Test of Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread Scones

Athena ScalziIf you follow Humans of New York, you may remember about a year and a half ago when HONY did a story over an Irish bar owned by a woman named Mary O’Halloran. After the bar got shut down due to the pandemic, HONY created a special fundraiser where you could pay $30 dollars for half a dozen of Irish soda bread scones made by Mary, as well as a homemade drawing from her daughter.

I placed an order as soon as I saw the post, and I wasn’t the only one. Mary ended up selling a million dollars worth of scones. Needless to say, it took a while for them to fulfill my order.

But, after eighteen months, I finally got my hands on a box of Mary’s Irish soda bread scones.

A cardboard box of Mary O's scones, alongside a drawing and two coasters.

With a drawing included, as promised.

The box, opened, revealing an exploded container of jam.

Apparently the jam did not like being in an airplane because it exploded! It totally soaked the surrounding tissue paper and got on the tops of some of the scones.

Six scones divided into two columns of three scones, or three rows of two scones.

Here they are in all their glory, slightly jam covered.

The instructions on the box said to heat them in the oven for a few minutes, so I did just that and then cut one in half, spread butter and homemade raspberry jam on it, and dug in.

Half of one of the scones, covered in jam.

It was a good scone! Six for thirty dollars is a pretty good price, and it was ten for shipping, so all in all, can’t complain too much! I mean, the eighteen month waiting time was more an odd occurrence than a problem, as I didn’t particularly care when exactly I actually got the scones. In fact, I would say that getting them eighteen months later just proves how dedicated they are, still making their way through the long, long list of people who were willing to help out a random Irish bar in New York. Gotta love it.

I would link you to the scones so you could get some for yourself, but they stopped accepting new orders for the scones a while ago, so I’m not sure how you can go about getting your hands on them. I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it that they were pretty good scones! I liked them, and don’t regret being one of the thousands of people that placed an order for them.

-AMS

8 Comments on “My Long Awaited Taste Test of Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread Scones”

  1. Mmm….scones! This reminds me, have you ever had cake truffles from Momofuku Milk Bar? Definitely worth placing an order.

  2. Mmmm, they look good.

    Such a shame you don’t have easy access to clotted cream in the US: jam and clotted cream is the correct accompaniment to a scone.

  3. The scones look great. Interesting, I was planning to make scones today. Now I can claim to be intimidated by Mary ‘O’s gorgeous scones & indulge in scone envy.
    I’ve always considered scones to be very small loaves of soda bread, but never really tried to make actual soda bread scones. I’ll have to try that. Today’s were going to be cherry almond scones or apple ginger. We’ll see what I end up with.

  4. I remember that post! What a sweet, hard-working lady. I am zero-percent surprised that you wanted to support her; I couldn’t at the time but I’m glad you did! And that the scones were good!

  5. chatGPT asked me to post a thank you note:

    my vocabulary of human modes of reaction now includes “scone envy”

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