My Rusks

Ingredients

500 g butter (one big block)
1½ cups sugar
1 bottle buttermilk (500 ml)
3 eggs
1 kg cake flour
2 Tbsp baking powder [2 tots]
1 tsp salt
4 cups of stuff (stuff in this case means bran, all-bran cereal, cornflakes, coconut, nuts, seeds – you add what you like in your rusks, but you need 4 cups in total, and bigger stuff like cereal you crush a bit finer in your hands as you add it)

method

Set your oven to 180 °C, find two large baking trays and give them non-stick spray.
Melt the butter and then mix the sugar into it. It does not need to boil, just become one. Now pour the buttermilk into the butter and mix that in. The idea is that the buttermilk cools the butter down for what is to come. Mix the eggs into the butter mixture until you have one smooth liquid of melted butter, sugar, buttermilk and eggs.
In a large mixing bowl, add the flour, baking powder, salt, 4 cups of stuff (bran, cereal, coconut, nuts, seeds etc) and mix all of this well.
Add the wet mixture of step 2 to the dry mixture of step 3 and mix well until everything is combined and you have rusk batter.
Decant the batter into the baking tray or trays. The shape and size of your trays will influence baking time and shape and size of your rusks, so no right answer but my baking tray surface is about 50 cm x 35 cm so aim for that or slightly less. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to spread it out evenly.
Bake for about 30 minutes at 180 ℃ until the tops are golden and a knife that you insert at various spots into what is now a baked rusk cake comes out clean. Bake longer if need be.
Remove from the oven and let the large unit of rusk cool down inside the pan until lukewarm, then slice it into rusks. A serrated knife works better than a chef’s or carving knife for this. Now tip the rusks onto a table. Where your slicing didn’t finish the job, break them into rusks and pack the rusks back onto oven trays or racks with slight spaces between each rusk. Logically you will need a bigger surface to pack them on than the trays you baked them in as there are now spaces between the rusks. Rusks can be imperfect shapes and sizes; this does not matter.
Back to the oven to dry the rusks, which is the most technical of baking rusks. For me, a modern convection oven with the fan setting at 100 °C works just fine to dry my rusks. It takes about four hours. Some say in older ovens you need a temperature as low as 50 °C and you need to leave the door slightly ajar. I’ve tried this but it takes ages, so try to avoid that. The way to test if the rusks are perfectly dry is to eat one, so I test often. You will know when they are perfectly dry. It is important to not stop drying too soon. They need to be absolutely dry for a perfect dip in your morning tea or coffee.
Let cool and then store in an airtight container.