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 (Gas Mark 6).
Rub the 100 g of margarine into the 200 g of flour in mixing bowl (i.e. repeatedly 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 (75 g moist brown sugar, 200 g self raising flour & an egg (minus shell)).
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.

Alternatives to the Sultanas or Raisins

The recipe easily makes several other cakes, some of which taste & feel substantially different, by replacing the sultanas/raisins with something else. For example:

Some other moist dried fruit. (Drier ones, like small hard currants, are not good as they make the cakes feel gritty.)
Lemon curd. This makes a moist cake with, if the lemon curd is only roughly mixed in, succulent inclusions of runny sweet lemon filling.
Chocolate chips. The result is rather like a hard version of a choc chip muffin.
Chopped apple & powdered cinnamon. The result is rather like an apple scone.
Dessicated coconut. Very dry and tastes rather like a coconut macaroon but without the sweetness.

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.
I prefer raisins but sultanas are usually cheaper.
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.
I've tried, following a friend's suggestion, using an electric mixer instead of rubbing in by hand. It did not work well. It took even longer than by hand because it mainly threw the dry mixture about rather than smearing it together. It was even messier than doing it by hand because it sent up a fine cloud of flour that settled for metres around about the kitchen. The result was very dry, needing considerable milk before the mix would stick together in balls, because it did not mix below levels of grains of flour coated fat about a quarter millimetre across thereby wasting much of potential flour uptake ability of the fat and so leaving much unbound flour.
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.

The chocolate drops, lemon curd, apple & coconut options were suggested by visitors to this site.