Recipe: Rock Cakes
Why yes, I am pathologically incapable of following a recipe as given. I assembled this from several recipes online and tweaked it to work with US measures. I made two batches, my other substitutions are below. This is a good recipe for using up small amounts of dried fruit and nuts leftover from other recipes.
Ingredients:
- 8oz self-raising flour
- 3oz brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- 2 teaspoons of spice (Penzey's Cake Spice and Baking Spice worked, get something with nutmeg in)
- 4.5oz unsalted butter (1 stick and 1 tablespoon)
- 5oz or more of dried fruit and or nuts
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon of milk
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Makes 16 rock cakes. Set the oven for 350f.
Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, and spice together. Cut the butter into small slices and rub it into the flour mix until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the dried fruit and mix well.
In a separate bowl, mix the egg, milk, and vanilla extract together.
Add the egg mixture to the flour and stir until you have a lumpy, sticky dough. If you need to, you can add a teaspoon more milk.
Put a dollop of rock cake into each of 16 muffin cups, sprinkle the tops with cinnamon sugar.
Bake at 350f for 15-20 minutes. At the 15 minute mark, see if you can push the top of a rock cake down. If you can, they probably need another 3 minutes.
These two batches helped clear out a bunch of stuff from the pantry, and also tasted good. Not too sweet, a little crumbly, and full of interesting flavours.
Substitutions:
Instead of white self-raising flour, you can use whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour and turn it into self-raising flour by adding 3 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
Add a half cup of ground flax seed to the dry ingredients.
Mix and match your dried fruit. I used 4oz baking raisins and 2oz walnuts for batch #1, then 5oz diced dried orange peel, 1oz baking raisins and 1oz dried cherries for batch #2
Rehydrate a teaspoon of dried orange peel, add it to the egg mixture.