Mary Berry's Fruited Tea Bread

This post was going to be about Mary Berry's Barabrith.  But then I figured I might get a few raised eyebrows from my Scottish followers because I'm holidaying North of the Border.  Thankfully, Mary saved the day because her 100 Cakes and Bakes book has a recipe for Fruited Tea Bread.  Which is exactly the same recipe as Barabrith, except for one using regular tea and sultanas, the other uses mixed fruit and Earl Grey tea.  The quantities for everything is absolutely the same.

Sadly not my lovely spotty tin

I picked this recipe as I needed something to sustain us on our journey tomorrow.  We're off even further up North and have a four hour car trip ahead of us (excluding traffic jams and pit stops).  So fruited tea bread seemed like something that would travel well.

Updated 5 July 2012 @ 20:11

I bought a bag of Tesco's luxury dried fruit to make this - in addition to the usual staples of sultanas and raisins it also included pineapple, apricots and cherries - and it makes for a more interesting bake than a regular teabread like the Barrabrith.  I know Morrisons do a similar bag of dried fruit as I use it for my Christmas cakes.  So do Waitrose although it's a fair bit more expensive.

The bake was a little paler than it should have been because I only had golden caster to hand instead of the required muscavado, but it didn't detract from the look or the flavour.  It took 50% longer to cook than stated, but it may be because I was using an unfamiliar oven and I was a bit paranoid about it not being a fan oven and burning the cake.

It was nice and moist with or without butter.  A good, solid crowd pleaser.  But then aside from the odd one or two, my family generally never complain about being given cake.

Our lovely land lady also popped by the day before this to drop off some homemade millionaire's shortbreads, presented in the lovely Cath Kidston tin in the picture.  I so wanted to take it home with me as it would be great for styling pictures for the blog.  Sadly I don't have any loveliness like that in my day-to-day life.  I must buy me some!

A couple of other asides.  When posting from an Android phone, it autocorrects 'fruited' to 'fried'  I had a few tweets asking about the novelty that is Mary Berry's Fried Tea Bread.  And sheep are very partial to slightly stale fruited tea bread.  As are chickens, peacocks and Shetland Ponies.  And toddlers who are given the stale fruit bread to share with the animal neighbours.