Scottish baking is not the fine pâtisserie of most mainland European countries. Scottish baked goods are more robust, more homely, and intensely satisfying to eat. As in France and Italy, many recipes originated in a particular region of Scotland. Take Selkirk Bannock, for instance: a rich, fruity yeast bread made in a round shape, it is delicious sliced and buttered, but even better, in my opinion, when sliced and toasted, then buttered.

Border Tarts are shallow pastry flans with a rich fruit filling, and sometimes they are glacé iced. Dundee cake is a fruit cake with circles of split almonds on the surface, which toast as the cake, bakes, thus imparting a wonderful flavour through the cake. Aberdeen rowies are also known as butteries, which is a very apt description - they are flat buns made of dense, salty, flaky dough. Good rowies, or butteries, knock spots off any croissant.

And then you find that there are some recipes which vary from region to region. Oatcakes, for example. The traditional Hebridean oatcake is usually made with fairly fine oatmeal and rolled out to a thickness of ¼in, (or ½cm), making it thicker and more robust than the oatcakes made in other Scottish regions. I like pinhead oatmeal in my oatcakes, which gives an altogether chunkier texture. Oatcakes are wonderful biscuits for eating with just about everything.

And oatmeal itself is one of the best of all the very many types of traditional Scottish basic foods - after all, armies fought and won battles fuelled by oatmeal, usually in the form of squares of cold porridge. Oatmeal - I love its coarsest cut, pinhead, known as "steel cut" in the US - is the best coating for racks of lamb, filleted fish and pieces of boned chicken, far better than breadcrumbs. And oatmeal, in the form of rolled oats (also known as porridge oats) forms the main part of flapjacks, when the oatmeal is mixed with butter, sugar and golden syrup and baked in a buttered tray

Another example of traditional Scottish baking associated with a particular time of year is black bun, a rich, dense fruit cake encased in short crust pastry and eaten at New Year. It used to be made with bread dough as the surround, but this was succeeded by short crust pastry.

I find it rather filling, but it must be remembered that black bun used to be eaten following the traditional house-cleaning on New Year’s Eve, when Scots housewives scrubbed thoroughly from the tops of their homes to the basement. They surely needed a hefty slice of black bun for revival. Hospitality throughout Scotland takes the form of food offered, and this is usually a form of baking, served with a cup of tea.

Source: www.news.scotsman.com