Bringing back Yorkshire Brack

Artisan ice cream company Yummy Yorkshire is hoping to revive interest in a traditional but little known Yorkshire cake in time for this year’s Huddersfield Food and Drink Festival.

The Huddersfield-based ice cream maker has made a special Yorkshire Brack & Jam ice cream featuring the traditional regional tea loaf.

The term ‘brack’ refers to a fruity cake made without butter and other fats, apart from what occurs naturally in the eggs. Loaded with dried fruit that is soaked overnight in tea – in Yummy Yorkshire’s case, Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Tea – the cake has a light texture and is often eaten as an afternoon snack with tea.

The resulting Yorkshire Brack & Jam ice cream consists of a subtle caramel ice cream with chunks of cake and a summer fruit ripple and recently won first place in the New Dairy Product category at the Great Yorkshire Show.

Yummy Yorkshire first created the flavour as one of a trio of limited edition flavours to celebrate the Tour de France and had an overwhelmingly positive response to it.

Due to the flavour’s popularity Yummy Yorkshire is continuing production for the Food and Drink Festival and aims to raise awareness of Yorkshire Brack, which according to Yummy Yorkshire co-founder Louise Holmes, appears to remain relatively unknown.

She said:

“We thought that most people were familiar with Yorkshire Brack as a traditional Yorkshire cake so were astonished to discover that most people hadn’t heard of it and have spent a lot of time explaining what it is when serving the ice cream.

“The ice cream flavour has nevertheless been hugely popular among customers so we thought that the Huddersfield Food & Drink Festival was a great opportunity to spread the word about Yorkshire Brack.

“The ice cream itself is delicious ““ as a Yorkshire business whose founders are both born and bred in the county – we thought that anything that mixes tea, cake, jam and ice cream was sure to be a winner!”

It is the fifth year that Yummy Yorkshire has created a special limited edition ice cream flavour for the Huddersfield Food & Drink Festival. Last year’s flavour was Claret and Gold in honour of the Huddersfield Giants and prior to this Lottie Shaw’s Seriously Good Yorkshire Parkin and Dandelion & Burdock ice cream were special festival flavours.

Hayley MacDonald, Event Manager of the Huddersfield Food & Drink Festival added:

“We are proud to have local businesses and local produce offered at the festival for people to enjoy. We are privileged that Yummy Yorkshire have specially produced an ice cream flavour to be launched at the Festival and hope that it will be a wonderful sunny day to encourage the festival folk to taste this unique ice cream from a great award winning local ice cream company. We know that it will definitely add to the beaming ambience and tasty treats that will surround our festival.”

The Yorkshire Brack & Jam ice cream will be available to buy for the duration of the food and drink festival (August 8 – 10) from Yummy Yorkshire’s stand, 35 & 36 on St George’s Square, along with some of the producer’s other award-winning ice cream flavours, sundaes and milkshakes.
The Huddersfield Food and Drink Festival is one of the largest free events of its kind in Yorkshire and brought nearly 150,000 visitors into the town last year.