These ‘rock cookies’ were made lightly compressed in paper cupcake forms.
Text and Photo © CM Cordeiro 2012
My first encounter with the Rock Cookie – if it wasn’t also the first thing I learnt to bake – was actually in Singapore in a cooking class in the all girl Convent in which I grew up.
The name of the cookie derives from the appearance of the cookie itself, the roughened shape resembling a rock. In line with going back to basics and using the simplest of ingredients, the original recipe for this cookie contains just five ingredients – flour, sugar, eggs, raisins and a pinch of baking powder.
Traditionally, butter and sugar are beaten till smooth in consistency, eggs added into the mixture and then flour and baking powder, with raisins following last. The cookies are then spooned onto baking sheets, with not too much fuss about the form of it, since part of its charm was for them to look artfully misshapened.
What I’ve done here in this variation of mine was to cut in the butter into the flour, drizzle sugar thereafter without having the sugar thoroughly mixed into the dough, leave out the baking powder instead adding a pinch of sea-salt. This mixture was then lightly pressed into paper cupcake forms and baked for about 15 minutes on 175C, where the melting butter and sugar are left to naturally bind the mixture together whilst baking.
What results is a light crumbly version of the original Rock Cookie, the surface shape of the cookie resembling pebbles on sand.
The ingredients are:
300g plain flour
120g butter
80g brown sugar (add more if you wish for the cookies to be sweeter)
2 eggs
pinch of salt
80g raisin
The cupcake forms help keep the shape of the cookies if you need to transport them to a picnic outdoors. Otherwise, they can just well be removed from the paper forms and served as is, with coffee to that Swedish summer’s afternoon.
Enjoy!