Rock Cakes Recipe
Description
Chunky hard fruity buns.
Summary
- Rub margarine into flour.
- Add sugar, fruit & egg (shell removed).
- Bake.
- Takes approximately: 10 min work, 20 min cooking, 50 min
total.
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
- Turn on oven to warm up to 200°C.
- 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.
- Wash hands (before everything else in the kitchen gets greasy).
- Mix in all the other ingredients.
- Line baking tray with greaseproof paper.
- Put balls (about 4 cm diameter) of the mix on the tray.
- 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).
- Allow to cool until hard.
Miscellaneous
- They can also be made with cheaper white sugar but will, of course, be less
tasty.
- The original recipe used half as much fruit which is cheaper but, of
course, less fruity.
- Use moist dried fruit like sultanas or raisins not small hard currants. I
prefer raisins but sultanas are usually cheaper.
- Replacing the dried fruit with chocolate drops makes a rather different but
also good cake.
- They can be topped with coarse-grain sugar &/or a (optionally halved) a
glace cherry each (but I prefer them without).
- If the mix is too dry to make balls because the eggs were smaller than
needed then moisten the mix with milk.
- My mother used to make them when I was a child with the white sugar
(financial limitations), reduced fruit (ditto), sultanas (ditto) and the half
(ditto) glace cherry (a fashion that feels very 1970s to me but is probably
older).
- I've heard that 'chunky hard fruity buns' has an accidental double
entendre in the USA dialect of English. Sorry but this page is written in
the UK dialect of English so if you were looking for muscular buttocks you have
come to the wrong place; enjoy the cakes instead.
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.