Irish Tea Cake (Brack Irish Tea Bread) Recipe
Description
Moist dense thinly-sliceable fruit cake.
Summary
- Soak sultanas etc. in tea.
- Add sugar, spice, egg & flour.
- Bake.
- Takes approximately: 10 min work, 1.5 h cooking, 10 h total.
Ingredients
| Dried sultanas or mixed cake fruit |
500 g |
| Boiling water |
400 ml |
| Teabags |
2 |
| Moist brown sugar (preferably muscovado) |
200 g |
| Self raising flour |
250 g |
| Egg (chicken) |
1 |
| Mixed cake spice |
1/2 tsp |
Equipment
Oven. Kettle (or some other way of boiling water for making tea). Mixing
bowl. Knife to mix with. Scales (or just estimate). Bread tin (about
house-brick size). Greaseproof paper.
Detailed Instructions
- Brew tea.
- Put dried fruit in the mixing bowl with the brewed tea (minus teabags).
- Leave to soak for a minimum of 2 h but preferably much longer, e.g.
overnight or whilst out at work.
- Turn on oven to warm up to 175°C.
- Mix in the sugar, egg (shell removed) & spice.
- Mix in the flour.
- Line loaf tin with greaseproof paper.
- Put mix in tin.
- Bake about 1.5 h (it is ready when a skewer pushed into a cake does
not come out with dough stuck on it).
- Remove from tin & allow to cool.
Miscellaneous
- Serve sliced like a bread loaf (i.e. parallel to the smallest face) with
slices about 1 cm thick and (optionally) spread with butter or similar.
- Don't overcook it because it does not taste nearly as nice when dried out
& hard.
- It is also really delicious when sliced & eaten before it has cooled
from the oven. It is succulently soft & moist at this stage and the butter
melts into it.
- It can be made with less fruit or with white sugar which will be cheaper
but is less tasty.
Origin
This recipe was passed down as a family recipe from my mother. She had
copied it from her mother-in-law who in turn had obtained it from the church
magazine of St. Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, in the 1950s. That is as far back as I
have traced it.I knew it as 'Irish Tea Cake' as a child but the original name
of the recipe was 'Brack Irish Tea Bread'.
The ingredients were 1 lb of mixed cake fruit, 2 cups of tea, 1 cup of brown
sugar, 2 cups of self raising flour, 1 egg, 1/2 tsp mixed spice, and cooking
for 2 hours at "a low heat". I converted it from cups to grams &
ml because different countries have different ideas of what a typical 'cup'
size is. I guessed that it meant a full level UK tea-cup and it worked so that
is what I converted to the metric measurements above.