Fat Rascals

The past few days have been fairly busy sorting things out from out holiday and also trying to sort out the whole house after builders laid a lovely new floor on our whole bottom floor whilst we were away. The view from the bottom terrace!

As I said previously, we had a lovely holiday relaxing, enjoying the views from one of the suntrap terraces as above, or just chilling out by the pool with a good book – but some days we did go out and on one in particular we drove down about 2hours to the famous Alhambra gardens on the mountains beside Grenada. A view over Grenada old town (which we visited on my Dad's birthday!) from the Alhambra.

The gardens were beautiful and we did have a nice time looking round the various palaces dotted around the gardens. As it was my Mum’s birthday we ate at restaurant called the San Francisco Parador for a birthday lunch – I can report that some parts were good (my orange chocolate ice cream cake!) other parts were very disappointing (a surprise starter soup where we couldn’t quite work out what the flavour was). We didn’t see everywhere because that day temperatures were around 38’C-40’C and we were desperate to get back to the icy pool! Me in the Alhambra!

Today I made Fat Rascals! I was going to help make birthday cake for my Daddy but the tins are still in storage so that is tomorrows project. These Fat Rascals, however, certainly did not disappoint! They are a cross between a scone and a rock cake and the idea originated in Yorkshire where the recipe was a simple dough with currants. I have watched my Mum make these before (and enjoyed the end result!) so decided to have a go myself. It is a recipe from the Waitrose website, and these cakes are served at Betty’s tearooms in York. They worked a treat. The idea is to make about 6 huge scones and drop them in a “rascally fashion” onto the baking tray. The method is rather similar to the Welsh Cakes I made.

I didn’t have some of the exact ingredients and the weather is so awful I wasn’t eager to go out so I made some easy substitutions – which as usual are in pink with the recipe. Very good results – I would definitely recommend these.

Fat Rascals, from Waitrose Magazine

Makes 6

Ingredients: 150g plain flour, sieved
150g self-raising flour, sieved
1tsp baking powder
130g cold butter, cubed
90g caster sugar
Grated zest of both one orange and one lemon (I used the grated zest of a lime)
1tsp cinnamon (I used 1tsp of ground mixed spice instead which contains cinnamon and nutmeg) ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg (see above)
150g mixed dried fruit (I used 150g currants)
50ml milk

Glace cherries and blanched almonds to decorate

1. Preheat the oven to 200’C.

2. Sieve both flours and the baking powder into a bowl. Add the butter and rub into the mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs.

3. Add the sugar, zests, spices and dried fruit and mix well.

4. Add the beaten egg and enough milk to bring the mixture together into a soft (read sticky) dough.

5. Form the mixture into 6 saucer sized rounds – 2cm deep.

I split my dough into 2 batches - so if anything went wrong with the first I could alter

the problem and rescue the second lot. Luckily, everything worked well!

6. Transfer to a non-stick baking tray and make for 15-20mins.

7. They are best served warm with butter and jam, but can be frozen and reheated.

Because he has now had to wait 4 days before getting birthday cake, I made a special Fat Rascal just for my Dad:

The end result was delicious - buttery, crumbly dough, sharp currants, crunchy almonds and oh-so-sweet glace cherries! Enjoy! x