Buttermilk Rusk Recipe

Visits to my hairdresser are always social affairs and more like going for coffee with the girls than the tedious few hours it used to be in an impersonal salon...

I digress. Nicky needed ideas for her son's South African Food day at school (he's a gorgeous grade one). We settled on rusks which means a blog post is necessary! I haven't been avoiding blogging, I've just been very busy living (met a new man, introduced him to salad, planted out a few hundred seedlings, trained for an adventure race, cooked many meals, put all my 'extra' stuff into storage, tidied up my house, ran a few hundred km, cycled a few hundred more, etc.)

We always have rusks in the house (it's one of Ouma's responsibilities to keep her busy - which has become my responsibility as she's not able to do it alone anymore). We have a few recipes we follow but the most popular (all over SA - the little sister travels and 'pays' for her accommodation at friends in boxes of rusks) by far is a recipe I got from a friend's housekeeper about 15 years ago.


Stina's Rusks

1kg Self raising flour
4 cups NuttyWheat flour (whole wheat)
2 cups sugar
10ml Cream of Tartar
10ml Bicarbonate of Soda
2ml Salt
500g butter or margarine
250ml boiling water
500ml Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Grease a large, square baking tin.

Mix dry ingredients in a big mixing bowl.

Melt butter in another big bowl. Mix in the buttermilk, rinse the buttermilk carton out with the boiling water and add this water to the mix. Mix wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until thoroughly blended. Put the mixture into your baking tin and bake for 1 hour.

Remove from the tin and once cool enough to handle cut into fingers and arrange on the wire shelves from your oven - the more gaps there are between the rusks the faster they dry. Reduce the oven temperature to 70-100 degrees and return the rusks until they are dry throughout. 

Store in an airtight container once cool.

Variations can include adding pretty much any seeds, raisins, dried fruit, etc.

Dunk in tea or coffee :)

A couple of my favourite baking recipes

 After an early start to my Saturday morning I arrived home ready to do some baking... Not that this doesn't happen often, I just thought I'd share two of my (from two great books!) most trusted recipes. I did the quick item first: Nigella Lawson's fairy cakes. I bought How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking with a voucher someone gave me for my 21st birthday and it's one of my most prized kitchen posessions. With recipes like this one you can understand why it's got pride of place in my kitchen :-)

Fairy cakes:

125g butter

125g castor sugar

2 large eggs

125g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp vanilla extract (much, much better than vanilla essence - I've tried both)

2-3 Tbsp milk

2-bun muffin tin lined with muffin papers. Preheat oven to 180 deg C

Put all the ingredients except the milk in a food processor and blend until smooth. Add the milk through the funnel, makind a soft dropping consistency - I never measure this I just add it bit by bit until I'm happy with the consistency.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin cases (one heaped tablespoon is all that goes into each case - yes, it looks tiny but works out perfect). Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the cakes are golden. Cool on a wire rack.

I never bother to cut the tops flat to decorate them properly, I merely make a very basic icing of icing sugar and water and a little lemon juice, coloured according to the occasion. They are so popular in our house that I make a double batch and unless they're hidden away, they're all gone within hours :-)

There's another book I probably couldn't live without: Biscuits and Breads by Lynn Bedford Hall. I make the banana loaf, muffins, breads, scones, etc and they're all wondeful. Today's choice was the buttermilk rusks with are also a real hit. Rusks get dunked in coffee, tea and hot chocolate depending on the season and there are absolutely always rusks of some description in the kitchen :-)

Buttermilk Rusks 

1.5kg self raising flour

10ml salt

250ml sugar

375g butter

500ml buttermilk

3 eggs

The original recipe says combine the dry ingredients and rub in the butter. I cheat a little bit and melt the butter and then use an electric beater to turn the mixture into bread crumb consistency which you would have achieved through the rubbing. This is because the recipe takes long enough as it is and I prefer to enjoy my baking experience, not loath it because of unnecessary work!

Next, beat the eggs into the buttermilk and in turn knead this into the flour mixture. This requires a very large bowl and some proper elbow grease! The more you knead, the higher the rusks will rise. If the mixture seems too dry put a little water into the buttermilk carton and add to the dough (I have never had to do this but in the beginning it looks like you'll nneed to for sure - be patient!) Knead until the dough forms a ball and comes away from the sides of the bowl. Roll it into managable sized sausages and cut into golf-ball sized chunks. Roll into balls and pack into an oiled baking tin (I use one big one but two bread tins will work perfectly too).

Bake at 200 deg C for 30 minutes, reduce the heat to 180 deg C and bake for a further 30min. Turn out, break apart the balls and return them to the oven at 120 deg C. remove them once they're completely dried out. If your balls turned out a little big, cut them in half lenthways before drying.