Breuder

Brueder - aka brooder and broder - is a sweet dough based cake traditionally made for Christmas and New Year in Sri Lankan Burgher households, a highly contested feature of the season, brought out with much flourish at each obligatory round of visits to relatives and near acquaintances, to receive the obligatory compliments on the lightness, the goldenness, the perfect distribution of raisins, and to be the subject after at the domestic dinner table of obligatory severe criticism when compared to that of one's mother-in-law/ spouse/ mother.

Its immediate relatives are Alsatian kugelhopf and Milanese pannetone, though it is more restrained in its ingredients than these; more...well...Dutch Reform as befits its source of entry into Burgher cuisine, than the alcohol fueled Celticism of the Kirsch or Cognac soaked raisins in the former or the luxurious Romish Catholicism of the latter with its tang of candied citrus.


I've just made my third attempt, and I am honest enough to say it compares not at all with the ghosts of breuders past. I put it down to the simple fact that I do not understand dough, which is to say that I don't understand the kneading of it and have a tendency to be too heavy or too long about it. My attempts at making bread are inevitable on the stodgy side and adding egg yolks as you do in brueder seems to just compound this tendency. People are kind about the result but it usually fails that critical test, the asking of a second slice.

But then, making breuder and the traditional Sri Lankan Christmas cake each year (look here under Cake 1) for me isn't part of an annual competitive social display. In the small circle of kin who meet together for a shared meal at Christmas complementariness and not competition is the rule. Making brueder and Christmas cake for me is as much about honouring my grandmother and mother and their part in making me the cook that I am as it is about giving pleasure to relatives and friends. It was when sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table stirring together the wealth of ingredients for the cake as they were added by my grandmother to a seemingly enormous brass bowl (and later, perched precariously now on a stool and leaning over the kitchen bench, adding the ingredients myself as my mother supervised her Sunbeam mixer), then placing a pale yellow batter gravel thick with dried fruit into a hot oven, and finally withdrawing hours later a treacle brown, firm, moist, warm cake from the oven, that the marvel of the transformative process that is cooking first entranced me.

Here's my grandmother's recipe for breuder:

2 lbs dough
10 hen eggs or 10 hen and 3 duck eggs, only yolks
¼ lb or less of plums
½ lb sugar
2 oz butter 

Take a board or basin - rub in a little butter on it, and in the hands, too. Mix up the dough with butter, till smooth. Then put in half number of eggs, one by one. Then sugar and remaining eggs alternately. Work it up until the mixture is well set, and comes off the board. Grease the pan and put in half the dough, then some plums, then the rest of the dough and the plums on top. Bake in a fairly hot oven. It would be best to leave the filled pan in the sun for an hour or two to allow it to rise before baking.  

How to make 1 lb of dough Peroline Brand dried live yeast. Use a teaspoon of this dehydrated yeast. 1 teaspoon sugar. ½ teacup hot water.

Method. Dissolve sugar and yeast in the hot water. Add the lb of flour and leave to ferment overnight for the best results.

You can read more of her recipes here.

You can find my updating of her recipe here under either Eggs 3 or Bread/Cake 2.I've metricised the quantities of the dry ingredients, reduced the number of egg yolks as mod Australian eggs are much larger than the free range eggs of the Sri Lankan chickens of her day and clarified that by 'plums' she means raisins. I have no idea whether Peroline brand yeast is available anywhere and just use a good baker's dry yeast.

Breuder is eaten with slices of Edam cheese usually, but I prefer it with a good sharp cheddar, and just to be sentimental I like to find one that has that red waxy skin you get around a ball of Edam.