Bara brith, a Welsh tea bread, is one of my favorite desserts to make. Chock full of dried fruits (its name translates to “speckled bread”), this is normally made with tea instead of kombucha. But if you have kombucha, why not add it instead? Anyway, no one knows for sure when bara brith got its start, but we know it was sometime before 1865. That’s when some Welsh settlers made it to Argentina and introduced it there. This is, at its heart, a luxury loaf. The amount of dried fruit is staggering. Normally I use around a pound or so, which roughly equates to about 7 pounds of fresh fruit. There are counterparts to bara brith in most Celtic nations, and they tend to also be found, by one name or another, wherever large numbers of Celts immigrate.
This recipe is done a little differently than one might typically, in that the measurements are largely in the form of “mugs” rather than cups or weights. When I first started making this several years ago, the mug method was introduced to me. This is what I use when I don’t feel like getting the scale out, though I’ve changed some of the ratios. The mug in question (photo below) is around 10 ounces, if I had to guess. You can use any size mug, though, and scale up or down depending on how many and which size loaves you’d like to make - this is why I love the “mug method” so. I’m making pastry for other people today (and me!), so I’ll be making half of these in small bread pans. Easier to share lots of things when you’re not foisting massive loaves of this and that on people, after all. This is for 2 regular loaves or 6 small or some combination thereof. You will want a second loaf, and it can be frozen if somehow you don’t need to open the second one within 2-3 days. Eat this with butter. I like to use nice salted ones.