I bought some dried fruits a little while ago with an eye towards making some Barmbrack in the next couple of days as well as some Moroccan style chicken stew. So far I'm batting 0/2 on my expected results.... not that I haven't eaten well just the results have not been what I was aiming for in specific ways.

I generally look at recipes and thinking about what it is that I like about them and what I dislike, then do something some where in the neighbourhood of them. This tends to serve me fairly well when cooking and really not so well when baking. So as I was doing the prep work for the stew I realized that a lot of the recipes call for chick peas, not my all time favorite (with the exception of Humus) so I thought I would just switch it out maybe. As it turns out for the recipe to bare some resemblance to what I want I need to follow it... the stew was good but did not seem terribly any style except tomato and chicken. I think that could have been solved by more spices and more stewing time but I was hungry and it had enough flavour as it was :)

So tonight I looked up a bunch of different recipes as to what people thought that Barmbrack should be... they ranged from everything from honeyed orange peel to triple strength yeastie beastie stuff. I picked a middle ground and didn't add the yeast, which may have been a mistake... but as before it tastes good and the dried apricots and cranberries give it a lot of sweet and texture. So I guess I'm happy enough, but next time I think its time for some yeast and make some real bread-like stuff!