Rock Cakes

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4 and line a baking tray with baking parchment.
2. Mix the flour, sugar and baking powder in a bowl and rub in the cubed butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs, then mix in the dried fruit.
3. In a clean bowl, beat the egg and milk together with the vanilla extract.
4. Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and stir with a spoon until the mixture just comes together as a thick, lumpy dough. Add a teaspoon more milk if you really need it to make the mixture stick together.
5. Place golfball-sized spoons of the mixture onto the prepared baking tray. Leave space between them as they will flatten and spread out to double their size during baking.
6. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden-brown. Remove from the oven, allow to cool for a couple of minutes then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool.
   15–20 minutes

Cooking notes

Baked goods are unforgiving with rounding — use weights rather than volumes whenever possible, and verify pan capacity if you scale up or down significantly.

For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.

When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.