Baking

Happy new year! I think you can just about get away with saying that still in the first week of 2010. The plan for this year is to do more baking and blog a few tested recipes here. The aim is for one each week - we'll see how we do with that!

With this in mind, I'm attempting a festive Twelfth Night bread-cum-cake tomorrow, using an excellent dough recipe from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters (which we wrote about earlier a couple of times) as its base. The book's a great buy for anyone looking to get into all kinds of baking, by the way, highly recommended. Here's it's Amazon link.

Our cake-y bread-y thing is going to be a fruity and spicy number, to suit the season, so the first step for baking it tomorrow is going to be soaking the fruit, so that's about:

180g of mixed dried fruit

45g of brown sugar in a bowl

- soak overnight in about 240ml of tea with a cinnamon stick, 5 cloves & 4 allspice berries. Or any whole spices you fancy.

I think I'll use red bush tea, as that's been successful for us when making bara brith in the past.

The full recipe will appear tomorrow, once I've wrestled the thing into something edible for Twelfth Night, which depending on your preference is either the 5th or the 6th of January. Of course, you can always come up with your own excuse for baking and eating a lovely cake...