Rock Buns

Rock buns are a British baked good, and the source says so plainly. Small, rough textured cakes made from flour, sugar, fat, eggs and dried fruit, they take their name from their craggy appearance rather than from their texture, which is tender and crumbly inside. They belong to British home baking of a particular era, when a cheap, quick cake made from pantry staples and eaten with tea was a household standard. The rough shape is not a matter of rusticity for its own sake: the dough is deliberately not shaped, only spooned onto a tray, and the peaks that form are what give the bun its name and its crisp edges. They travelled with the British empire and are still widely baked in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and across the Caribbean, where they turn up in school canteens, bakeries and home kitchens and are treated as entirely local. That is a real part of their story, and it is why one appears in this archive. But the bun itself is British in origin, so it sits in the Worldwide Recipes collection rather than being presented as an African dish.