Potato Cakes

The harvest has been continuing and I've been digging up potatoes.

We've been quite surprised at how many we got in the end.  Water was an issue for most of the summer, I didn't mound them up as high or as well as I'd intended to and the chooks kept getting into the garden and scratching them over.

I've been going through them, washing the dirt off, spreading them out to dry before weighing them (just for my own curiosity), grading them and putting them into storage.

I found more than I expected that I'd stabbed or split with the fork when digging them up.  I also found quite a few diseased patches.  I've just done a google search and found the disease I was seeing is called Common Scab and would not have affected the way they store.  I pulled out these damaged potatoes, initially thinking that we'd just cook them up and eat them first, but the volume was getting to be more than we'd normally eat in a week so today I went looking for things I could do with them to be able to freeze and use them later.

I split them in half and made Potato Rosti and Potato Cakes.

I don't remember where I got the recipe for Potato Cakes from, it was hand written into my old cookbook at least 20 years ago.  Below is the basic recipe, I trebled it today.  I don't recommend doing this unless you have a commercial sized mixer and commercial oven.  It took me hours to get them all cooked.

These are gluten free so they tend not to brown, but they are cooked.

Potato Cakes

225g Self-raising Flour
350g Cold mashed potato
100g butter
1 tbsp milk
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 230°C.  Sift flour into a bowl, add butter and rub in until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.  Stir in seasoning, potato and milk until a firm dough is formed.  Roll out the dough on a floured board and cut into 3" rounds using a plain biscuit cutter and place on a greased baking tray.

Bake or 10-15mins until golden brown.  Serve piping hot, split in half carefully and spread generously with butter.