I love baking with the kids and one of our favourite recipes has to be our rusk recipe. Now I must confess when I first tried baking rusks I tried a few different recipes and everyone was a flop – and I mean complete, utter flop – the kind when nothing can be eaten. But my kids love rusks so I kept trying and then my daughter’s Godmother gave her this recipe and we have used it over and over again and not one flop.
In fact last weekend when we were getting worried about the food shortages in the shops we baked a nice big batch and the kids have been having rusks and Rooibos tea for breakfast.
So here it is
Ingredients
- 250g melted butter
- 1kg self-raising flour
- 4 eggs (beaten)
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 x containers of buttermilk (ours are normally 300ml containers but in our latest batch I could only get 2x 275ml and they turned out perfect)
- 1tsp vanilla
Instructions
- whisk the sugar and eggs together
- add the vanilla and the buttermilk and mix well
- in a separate bowl add the melted butter to the flour and rub it in properly
- Add the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture and mix together.
We bake ours in 3 loaf tins at 180C for 1hr (check on the time – in my old oven it was closer to 50 mins)
Take the rusk loaves out of the tins and let them cool under a dishcloth for about 2 hours.
Now you need to slice the rusk loaves. I cut our loaves into 4 sections and then slice each of those sections.
The next step is VITAL – you need to dry the rusks. If you don’t do this properly they will end up yucky (yip yucky).
You want to place the rusks on oven racks in a cool oven (about 100C) for around 3 hours. We leave our oven door slightly open (we place a wooden spoon in the side of the oven so there is a slight gap. This drying process is vital. And after the 3 hours I normally check one of the rusks by dunking it in tea and if it has not dried properly I even leave it in for longer.
In the past the drying period often messed me up – rule of thumb if you are not sure if they have dried out properly leave them in for longer.
And enjoy !!!
ofamily learning together 