It’s probably fair to say these rusks were a large part of the inspiration for Rockhoppin’ Recipes. They’re everything I love about rustic food – rough, chunky and packed with taste, they’re wickedly delicious.

Ingredients
480g  cake flour
1½ tsp  baking powder
pinch  salt
200g  bran flakes (roughly crushed)
80g  raisins
80g  cranberries
80g  sultanas
100g  pecan nuts (chopped)
½ cup  mixed seeds (sunflower, sesame, linseed, pumpkin)
200g  brown sugar (Muscavado)
270ml  buttermilk
1 jumbo-sized  egg
250g  salted butter (melted)
1 tsp  vanilla essence

Method

• Preheat oven to 180C and lightly grease a large baking tray (I use the oven tray) with butter.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine all dry ingredients.
• In a separate bowl, lightly mix the buttermilk, egg, butter and vanilla essence.
• Add wet to dry ingredients, and hand-mix thoroughly.
• Press mixture onto baking tray, and bake for 50-60 mins until golden.
• Cool in the baking tray, then turn onto a board and cut into rusks.
• Reduce oven temp to 100C, spread rusks onto a large oven rack (or back onto the baking tray, if no rack) and leave in oven for at least 4 hours, turning a few times.
• (*I like to then leave them in the oven overnight [temp off] to dry them out as much as possible.)
• Cool, and then store in an airtight container.

Makes about 30 rusks, depending on the size you cut them.