Cooking With Tea - Barm Brack

I didn't think I would ever find a tea-soaked fruit cake that I would like better than my beloved Marmalade Tea Loaf, but I have. It's the Barm Brack recipe from (appropriately enough) the Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia cookbook.*

Barm Brack is an Irish fruit loaf, often served with a cup of tea in the afternoon; it may be yeasted, or not.

The version I made is unyeasted, and could not be simpler. You are meant to soak the fruit in the tea overnight; I wasn't that organised but it didn't seem to matter (thought I should probably do it properly next time). The recipe in the NMAA book says you can use mixed dried fruit or a single one; I opted for currants and soaked them in a strong cup's worth of Ceylon tea - although I suppose Irish Breakfast would be most appropriate!

Here's the recipe as I made it:

500g currants

250ml strong black tea, hot

1 cup brown sugar

2 cups self-raising flour

1 egg

Mix the currants and sugar together and soak in the strained hot tea for an hour or so (or ues cold tea and soak overnight).

Preheat oven to 150C and thoroughly grease a large (9in by 5in) loaf pan (if it's not non-stick you may want to line it as well just to be sure)

Stir the flour and the beaten eggs thoroughly into the fruit mixture. Pour into the prepared tin and bake at 150C for about 2 hours (mine took about 1 hour 50 minutes). 

Allow to cool for 15 minutes in the tin, then turn out and cool completely.

Serve sliced with butter and a cup of your best black tea.

I can't tell you how well this went with a pot of Margaret's Hope 'Silver Moon' second flush Darjeeling (from Thunderbolt Tea) - the currants and the muscatel flavour of the Darjeeling were perfect together.

*My mum cooked lots of stuff from this when I was little, and still goes to it for many cakes, which are all delicious. She bought me a new copy just before I had Pippin; it is unchanged - and I mean unchanged, curried sausages with sultanas and all - from the original 1975 version. I'm not game to make the curried sausages as I have less-than-fond memories of them from my childhood, but the cakes and slices really are excellent.

True Diversi-tea

Ok, I couldn't resist the pun, but take a look at this anyway... four different kinds of black tea, and how different they all are:

Arya Autumnal Darjeeling

Ceylon orange pekoe

Singbulli STFGOP First Flush Darjeeling

Yunnan Golden Tips

Summer Strawberry Tea

I hosted my first formal tea party last Sunday, which was attended in high spirits by three friends (and my husband, naturally), and crowned by the successful production of scones in our Weber BBQ (as our gas oven and stove decided to go kaput late last week, seriously throwing out many of our cooking plans for the weekend). I admit to being dubious initially about the capacity of the BBQ to produce baked goods, but I am now a convert, and possibly likely to become an enthusiast. We’ll see.

Half the fun (or more) is in the preparation for these kinds of events; my mum and I are inveterate colour-coordinators at Christmas time, and I love setting myself a theme to work within, then hunting down the requisite matching stuff: place cards, favours, invitations, table

 linen, whatever else is required. Not to mention the pleasure of rifling through the boxes in the garage, which contain all the antique china that we have no room to store in our current small, insufficiently-provided-with-storage-space house, in order to locate some of my beautiful vintage teacup, saucer and plate sets.

And of course, there was the cooking. Fortunately the scones were the only thing I needed to actually bake on the day; and the chocolate for the pistachio and white-chocolate dipped strawberries could be melted in the microwave (I do usually prefer a saucepan over simmering

 water, but needs must, etc).

Other menu items included cucumber sandwiches, and horseradish-laced mini wraps containing roasted capsicum and salad greens (I think these were my favourites). Turns out my husband had never eaten a proper afternoon-tea style cucumber sandwich, crusts cut off and sliced into fingers, before this auspicious event; well, now he knows what he’s been missing out on. The scones were accompanied by lashings of whipped cream and strawberry jam; and the finale was tiny little teacups made of dark chocolate (acquired from a fantastic deli in north Canberra) and filled with my husband’s home-made strawberry gelato. Exquisite!

To serve with all this I brewed up some spearmint-hibiscus iced tea, fantastically ruby-coloured and refreshing, as well as a large pot of Ceylon tea from the Nandana estate, a lovely twisty OP leaf that gives a coppery liquor with a bright, almost fruity flavour. Once these were all consumed and our capacity for food exhausted (for the time being), I brought out some Pi Lo Chun (which I have written about here) to round things off.
On the whole it seemed to be a resounding success and I am already planning an autumn-themed tea for a couple of months’ time…

And a credit to my husband, who took the photos you see on this page, which is why they are extremely artistic and beautifully shot. Thanks honey!

Quest for summer sanity, via iced tea, continues

It's a relatively cool evening, thanks to the delightful breeze that's wafting through the open windows (it doesn't seem to be wafting too many mosquitoes through the tatty flywire at the moment, an added bonus). 

It's been a relatively lazy weekend which saw me and my husband and our cat piled on the couch for a post-lunch snooze this afternoon... although I did get up early to do some baking: inspired at the prospect of having blackberry-basil iced tea at breakfast, I decided to make some blackberry muffins to accompany it. They were very good; and the tea was fantastic.

The recipe for the blackberry-basil syrup is courtesy of the delightfully whimsical TeaSpot NYC blog and I knew I just had to try it as soon as I read about it. It's a beautiful balance of sweet and tart and the colour is amazing - I should've taken photos, but was too busy enjoying my breakfast to bother. (There is some blackberry-basil syrup left, though, so I still have the option - maybe tomorrow.)

The tea itself was a Ceylon single estate tea, Nandana Orange Pekoe, which I bought in NZ from T Leaf Tea, cold brewed overnight. Cold-brewing this tea yields a beautifully pale amber liquor, very mild (it's redder and stronger tasting when hot) and combined with the syrup it was truly a taste sensation. The basil added such a striking spicy, aromatic note. I think it would also go well with strawberries if blackberries aren't available (mind you I used frozen ones).

Then this afternoon I made myself a pot of spearmint and hibiscus (a teaspoon of each herb per cup), hot-brewed, steeped strong and then poured over ice. Minty and sour, 100% refreshing.

And now I'm finishing off the day with a few glasses of iced Haru-Poro-Poro (cold-brewed over the course of the day). This is a combination of sencha, green rooibos and raspberry flavouring - it's astringent (in a good way), sweet and the raspberry flavour is not overpowering. It really is delicious iced. It's from Lupicia - a wonderful shop in Melbourne which I visited at Christmas time.  They have loads of beautiful oolongs and greens that I would love to try; I'll have to see if I can schedule another trip when I'm next in Melbourne.