A couple of weeks ago, grandson Freddie (10) wanted to help me when I started making some rock cakes. I had the boys with me for the afternoon and was trying to think of some quick and easy cakes to make and remembered how my mother made rock cakes most Sundays – and they’re very quick to make. Freddie ended up doing most of the ‘making’, with me giving instructions from Delia Smith’s recipe for Good Old Fashioned Rock Cakes in her cake book. They worked really well but because his mum doesn’t eat dried fruit – and we’d put in currants like Delia – Freddie wanted to make some she’d eat another time. Later, I looked on the blog thinking, I must have put rock cakes on here at some time, and found a recipe for Blueberry Rock Cakes (click here). So when today Freddie asked if he could make some rock cakes – entirely without prompting – I suggested that recipe. But no, he didn’t want to put blueberries in … he’d like to put chopped-up strawberries in. We followed the blueberry version recipe, which was actually an old Katie Stewart one, and with just a little supervision from me, Freddie did it almost entirely on his own. 

Because it was such an old recipe (from The Times Calendar Cookbook, 1976), it used Imperial measurements but most scales will switch between these and Metric. The cakes, to be honest, aren’t really true rock cakes and we didn’t pile them in loose mounds onto a baking tray but put them into muffin cases. But in essence, they’re ‘rock cakes’ and bring a lovely memory of all those rock cakes my mother made when I was young, and now her great-grandson Freddie has taken up the rock cake mantle! And so delicious were they, long may his enthusiasm  last!

Strawberry Rock Cakes – Makes 9

• 8oz plain flour
• 1 rounded teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3oz soft butter
• 3oz light soft brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 3oz strawberries, chopped into quarters

Preheat the oven to 200C/180 Fan/Gas 6

All the ingredients go into a large bowl – except the strawberries – before mixing begins. Freddie weighed everything out and tipped them into the bowl as he went. Following the blueberry recipe, we started mixing with an electric mixer but because it’s quite a dry mix, it’s hard and Freddie remembered that Delia mixes it all with her hands, rubbing it with her fingers. So he abandoned the electric mixer and did it by hand. And that worked much better.

It comes together into quite a stiff dough. 

Once the dough is smooth and evenly mixed it’s time to cut up the strawberries. They were quite small ones so Freddie cut them just into quarters, but one larger one he cut into 8 pieces.

Tip the strawberries into the dough. Freddie thought it best to continue using his fingers to mix it all – as gently as possible – together. Apart from not squashing the strawberries, rock cakes should have minimal mixing and you don’t want to be too heavy handed.

Now he used a spoon to put clumps of the mixture into muffin cases. We had enough to fill 9 cases.

They need to go into the oven for 15-20 minutes. We checked after 15 and they weren’t quite done, so we gave them another 3 minutes. Then they were taken out of the oven and put on a cooling rack. They looked and smelled very good!

It was about an hour later that I decided now the cakes were cool, we should try them. I made a cup of tea for myself and then Freddie was the first to try a cake. He delightedly told me they were delicious. I tried the next one, and indeed they were very good. We called the other two boys through to the kitchen and they loved them too.

I have to confess I wasn’t totally convinced by the strawberry idea but it worked really well. Bravo, Freddie! I said to him that he’d done it all mostly on his own and I thought after a couple more times with my help – only in terms of watching really – he’d be able to make them entirely on his own.