Irish barmbrack is a kind of fruit bread that is rich in history and tradition in Ireland, it has roots in Celtic harvesting traditions and has morphed into a halloween tradition where the Irish will often hide charms in the bread. The recipe I used is below and has a wonderful insight into the history of barmbrack which in Irish is Bairín Breac, which "means ‘speckled bread’ indicating that the fruit was scarce in the loaf."
This bread is delicious and has been described in some of the comments as Irelands answer to Soreen the much loved english malt loaf, better than Soreen and simply the best vessel for butter (aside from a funnel of course!) I made a couple of alterations to the recipe, I halved it for starters and made it in a loaf tin and secondly I used soft brown sugar as other recipes suggested it. The bread was delicious but for me as you can see in the photos the dried fruit sank to the bottom, once I get to the bottom of why this happened I'll update the post!
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