Mar 24, 2009
This is very good. I made it for dessert on St. Pat's Day, and everyone liked it very much. I'm giving it four stars instead of five because the baking time was so far off for me. I read another reviewer who made the same complaint, so I watched the oven very closely. The temp stayed exactly at 350, and my cake (baked in a loaf pan) was done in 45-50 minutes. This cake is quite sweet, even though I cut the brown sugar down to 3/4 C, lightly packed. (If you reduce the sugar as I did, be sure to cut down on the tea--maybe from 1 3/4 C to 1 1/2, so that the batter won't be runny and the fruit won't settle at the bottom.) By the way, I used regular (brown) Sunmaid raisins and substituted glace fruit for the citron. (I'm sure that citron would have been very good because lemon goes so well with tea, but I didn't have any.) Also, I didn't have self-rising flour, so I made my own. For this recipe, just add 1 7/8 T baking powder and 5/8 t salt to the flour before sifting. One last thing: I always wonder what a recipe is going to taste like; and since I'd never heard of barm brack, I was especially concerned about this one. I'd call it a kind of cross between zucchini bread and fruit cake--remember that I used glace fruit, not citron--with a slight tea flavor (though no one but me seemed to taste the tea), and it's moist and dense in texture. Anyway, this was really easy, tasty, and a little bit different from other desserts.
—CAROL
