Bara brith

I hadn't even heard of bara brith until stumbling across it online last week, but it sounded fun, tasty and easy! From my brief dive down the rabbit hole, it seems that it's something that's evolved over time, starting off as a yeasted bread with dried fruit into something more cakey. I'm very much doing the latter here, but at some point I might also get around to baking one of the more traditional recipes I found. I'm winging it a bit, but it's essentially a mashup of these three recipes.

Bara Brith

Ingredients

• 280g Dried mixed fruit
• 300ml Strong tea
• 150g Dark soft brown sugar
• 250g Plain flour
• 2tsp Baking powder
• 2.5g Salt
• 1tsp Mixed spice
• 1tbsp Whisky marmalade
• 1 Egg
• 20g Melted butter

Method

1. Soak the dried fruit in the tea overnight.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and mixed spice).
3. Stir in the mixed fruit, tea, marmalade, egg and melted butter and mix thoroughly.
4. Pour into a lined loaf tin and bake at 160C for ~1hr15, covering with foil if it gets too dark.
5. Allow to cool slightly and remove to a wire rack to cool.

Here is the finished article! (The colour balance has gone a bit weird - it's not nearly such a strange colour in reality)

And the verdict? Well, it's nothing special - it is essentially just a tea loaf after all - but then I don't think that baking always needs to be special. It is, however, really rather nice, certainly when still warm and fresh from the oven - the real test will come tomorrow once it's cold. For now at least, I will say that it's pretty lovely - it's super moist from the tea-soaked fruit and the long, low temperature bake, and the spice is relatively subtle, but sufficient to prevent it from being boring. And best of all, it's such an incredibly easy thing to bake - something that you can really easily do on a weeknight!

[Update] I think I wasn't quite generous enough with my initial verdict - this has shot right up to pretty near the top of my list of favourite baking things! It's really not special at all, but I really think that's a big part of its charm - something that you can just enjoy without necessarily paying all that much attention to. It's stayed really moist, and the flavours are still really nicely balanced - I don't know if I'd say that they've noticeably developed though. Given how easy this one is to do, I think it's absolutely one of my best recipes now!