Bara Brith

This is the tea bread I made and brought to France last summer. The only difference is that I used lemon juice and zest instead of orange, and I added crystallised ginger quite generously.

175 ml strong, warm tea
225g mixed dried fruit
Finely grated zest and juice of 1 unwaxed orange
150g light soft brown sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
225g self raising flour
Pinch of sea salt
1 tsp mixed spice

Start the day before you need this. Place dried fruit, orange zest and juice, sugar and tea in a mixing bowl large enough to hold everything. Cover and leave overnight for everything to plump up.

Preheat the oven to 180° C/gas mark 4. Add the egg to the fruit mix and stir it in. Then sift the flour and salt and spice together over the mixture. Mix carefully together to form a soft dough. Spoon it into a lightly greased and lined loaf tin.

Bake in the oven for about 1 hour until the top is golden brown and a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Leave in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out to cool on a wire rack.

It will keep for 2 or 3 weeks if you can wait and tastes better if you leave it a few days before getting started on it.

Garden

A year ago our garden was littered with debris from the builders and the weeds were running wild. We spent a lot of time in August levelling the ground, filling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with good topsoil from a large, unruly heap under the cherry tree and spreading it around the garden more evenly.

Once this was done I sowed two packs of phacelia seed all over the new expanse of bareness. It germinated well and by October it was was knee-high, where it stayed all through the winter. About six weeks ago the first delicate, pale purple flowers began to appear on the now waist-high plants. My intention in planting them was to give a good ground cover through the winter and then dig the whole lot in come the spring. But they are just too pretty to dig in, so I have kept about twelve square feet of them. The scent is not overwhelming but very lovely and the mauve flowers have attracted dozens of bees to our patch. I didn't expect the bees to visit in such big numbers, but on a sunny afternoon it is really relaxing to watch them at work.

I spent most of my Easter holiday clearing a space for a lawn and some vegetables. The grass is growing well now and ready for its first cut, and the runner beans, lettuce and rhubarb look fairly good. I'm looking forward to seeing those bright, scarlet blooms on the beans in a couple of months.

We also have a trampoline-sized hole in the garden, just beyond the new lawn. Steve spent hours digging it out. The trampoline fits inside it well and it means that the children do not have so far to go before they hit the ground if they bounce off it at the wrong angle. But in the long term the hole in the ground will become a pond once the pair of them tire of jumping around on a springy circle.

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Posted By Blogger to kith & kin on 6/07/2014 05:53:00 pm