Buttermilk Rusks

According to Hubby, rusks are strictly baby’s teething food. To a South African though, they are so much more. The perfect accompaniment to your coffee (or tea). Dunked, people they have to be dunked, but there is a knack for getting it just right. Not enough & it crumbles all down your front when you bite into one, too much & you end up with chunks in your drink. But when you get it right….ahhhh bliss

I have never been tempted to make my own as no one else would enjoy them with me so I usually save it up and pig out on them when in South Africa. Enter the black hole that is Pinterest and all manner of tempting recipes pop up every single day. When I spotted this pin, I was sold…

photo by http://drizzleanddip.com/

I checked I had all the ingredients. Turns out I didn’t of course, so I had to wait until grocery day to stock up. When I eventually got around to making them I was horrified to discover I had to bake them and then leave them in a warm oven OVERNIGHT to dry out. (recipe selection 101, read ALL the instructions BEFORE deciding on making it) Geez, talk about a let down. Anything that involved usually results in me skipping it and moving onto the next recipe. Add to that my slight paranoia over leaving my not-so-trusty-oven on all night while we sleep and I was in for a looooong dry time. I think I managed 5 hours before bed & then again the next morning for a couple of hours before we went out. Finished off once we got home, in the middle of which a friend popped around for coffee & we sampled the not-quite-done rusks. Tasted good but the texture was still too cakey in the middle. But you will be happy to know that they did eventually dry out properly & I have been enjoying one every night with my cuppa.

Other than that, the recipe was easy. Find it HERE

500g of butter & 350g sugar…melt

1.5kg of self raising flour!

Cream of tartar, salt & 500 ml buttermilk rounded out this ensemble nicely. She does advise making smaller ones over the quite large ones she made, but the rebel in me went with large ones too. Should have listened! Besides taking forever to dry out, smaller ones would have been more appealing to the kids. Although mine did give them ago, but never finished a whole one. I got 35 rather massive ones so I’m guessing you could easily get double if not more with smaller ones.

They don’t look so big here but the photo is deceiving!

Would I try them again? No, probably not. They were/are tasty but I couldn’t be bothered with the kerfuffle of drying them out!

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