Bara Brith

(We've been in Wales for 4 weeks already! Time has flown by)

Speckled bread is a traditional Welsh bread, known as bara brith (pronounced bara breeth). I made a sweet, tea infused version that is more cake than bread, but which is the most widely served kind. It's pretty much like a regular fruit cake and is definitely speckled.

I then dove a little deeper into the origins of this bread, and discovered that it had traditionally been a yeast bread with sugar, mixed spice and fruit for special occasions in the mining community. 

I tried an online recipe of the yeast version, which came out like this. Funny thing was, this one didn't have any tea in it. It tasted just like hot cross buns for Easter, it just didn't have a white cross on it.

I tried to find a more 'traditional' tea and yeast bread, and found one from The Great British Bake Off TV show, so I tried to see what the tea version was like.

Mixed dried fruit plumped up with tea. The remaining liquid part of the tea is used, too.

This is it

Well, it was okay. Meh, nothing to write home about, though that is exactly what I'm doing! Definitely bready, but no real impact from the tea. I'm going to stick with the fruit cake version from now on. We both like it more.

You just never know where curiosity will take you! In researching breads, waterfalls, town and river names, I have stumbled onto a pattern of Welsh naming conventions - the common noun comes first, followed by the specific name, so for Bara brith: bara is bread, brith is speckled. For Pistyll Rhaeadr, the literal translation would be Waterfall Rhaeadr and for Afon Cain, it would be River Cain. In English, we're more likely to say Cain River or Speckled bread. So happy to have worked it out for myself!