Rock Cakes Recipe

Description

Chunky hard fruity buns.

Summary

Ingredients

Sultanas or raisins 200 g
Margarine 100 g
Moist brown sugar 75 g
Self raising flour 200 g
Egg (chicken) 1

Equipment

Oven. Mixing bowl. Knife to mix with. Scales (or just estimate). Baking sheet. Greaseproof paper.

Detailed Instructions

  1. Turn on oven to warm up to 200°C.
  2. Rub margarine into flour in mixing bowl (i.e. repeated pick up handfuls of the mix & use thumbs to smear it out across fingers) until the mix looks like breadcrumbs.
  3. Wash hands (before everything else in the kitchen gets greasy).
  4. Mix in all the other ingredients.
  5. Line baking tray with greaseproof paper.
  6. Put balls (about 4 cm diameter) of the mix on the tray.
  7. Bake 15 to 25 min (ready when inside no longer looks raw & damp &/or a skewer pushed into a cake does not come out with stuck on dough).
  8. Allow to cool until hard.

Miscellaneous

Origin

Family recipe dating back at least to my grandmother & probably earlier.

Although I was used to from my mother had white sugar in it , I once ran out of white when making it, used moist brown and found it tasted better. I mentioned it to her and was told that what I had accidentally rediscovered was her mother's recipe that had been reduced to white sugar by her to save money. The raisin improvement I likewise found out when my local supermarket ran out of sultanas. The chocolate drops alternative was suggested to me by a reader of this site who had likewise run out sultanas & raisins but had chocolate drops and found they worked too. Hence if you don't have one of the ingredients, try substituting (with something safe to eat) and see what the result is; it could well be an improvement!

The milk I did not know about until another reader of mentioned that their family used to include milk. I asked my mother and she revealed that her mother's recipe had "add up to 1 dsp milk if the egg is small" which she had ignored (I assume as egg sizes in the UK had be standardised by the 1970s) so I added that milk as an option to my recipe.