Learn about Donegal Square
Welcome to Donegal Square! Our goal is to bring the best of Ireland and the British Isles straight to you, as if you were visiting Ireland with your friends and family…no passport required of course!
Baking is deeply rooted into the Celtic culture, GrannyMac® has captured these traditional tastes and textures of the Ireland and British Isles with these classic generational Bake-At-Home mixes. Irish Soda Bread, Brown Bread, Scones, Fancy Scones, Shortbread, and Scottish Oat Pancakes.
Back in 1997 when I decided to open Granny McCarthy’s Tea Room and bakery in our building in Bethlehem (right behind Donegal Square our Celtic import shop) my wife Linda and I took an exploratory tour to Ireland to find the best Brown Bread in the country. My mother and my aunt Sally had great recipes for Brown Bread or Wheaten bread as it’s called in Northern Ireland where I grew up, so I had some good options to start with.
We ended up deciding on a recipe from the Lifeforce Mill in Cavan Town, an old mill built to provide work during the famine and renovated in the mid 1990s. We read an article on the Mill in Ireland of the Welcomes Magazine and as a result visited the mill. The tour involved learning the mills history and mixing up your own loaf of wonderful brown bread to bake while taking the tour. Sampling the fresh bread after the tour complete with butter and jam and a big mug of tea convinced us that we had the best brown brewed in Ireland.
We imported the Wholemeal from the Mill for years as Wholemeal is the secret component to brown bread not available in North America, and later figured out our own blend of locally sourced grains to create our own wholemeal and mix.
After years of selling Brown Bread and our Brown Bread mix successfully to 1000s of our customers, we decided to Trademark our Brown Bread mix along with Soda Bread, Traditional and Fancy Scones, Shortbread and Scottish Oat Pancakes, all items we have been selling successfully in Granny McCarthy’s and McCarthy’s Red Stag Pub – the restaurant and Pub which we morphed Granny McCarthy’s Tea Room and bakery into.