Collect together your equipment (see Recipe Notes below) and ingredients.

Preheat oven to Fan Oven 160°C/180°C/350°F/Gas 4 and line baking trays with baking parchment, if necessary.

Make sure the butter is at room temperature. If you need information on softening butter, see here. Put the butter, salt and sugar into a large bowl and, using an electric whisk, beat until fluffy. This should take 3-4 minutes. 

Add the egg and vanilla extract/paste and whisk again until thoroughly mixed.

Add the flour, spice and baking powder to the butter mixture and beat, on a slow speed, until almost entirely incorporated.  Alternatively, fold in the flour by hand.

Finally, fold through the raisins or currants.

Next, divide the dough into 30 – 35 x 20g balls. I am quite specific how I do this. I line a baking tray with parchment, sit it on top of the kitchen scales and zero the scales. I can then check that each cookie weighs 20g each. I use a tablespoon measure or a small ice cream scoop. The more accurate you are, the more consistent your cookies will be when cooked.

Once you have divided the dough into balls, roll gently into a neater shape (the dough will be very soft at this stage).

To bake straight away: when you are ready to bake your cookies, place them spread out on a baking sheet – I get 6 per sheet, depending on the size of the baking sheet. Do not bake more than 6 at a time, or shaping them after cooking will be difficult. (See below.)

Baking one tray at a time: bake in a pre-heated oven for 9 minutes 

Baking two trays at a time: bake one tray for 4½ minutes on the upper shelf. After 4½ minutes, place this tray on the lower shelf and place another baking tray of cookies on the top shelf. Cook for a further 4½ minutes. Remove the tray from the lower shelf and keep rotating and baking the cookies at 4½ minute intervals until they are all cooked. Each tray of cookies should bake for a total of 9 minutes. Staggering the baking, will help when you to shape the cookies as they come out of the oven.

The cookies are cooked when: they have spread out a little, are starting to brown slightly on the edges and look ever so slightly underdone. They should still be very soft.

As soon as the cookies come out of the oven and are still very hot and soft, place a 6 cms cutter over a cookie, (you may need to slightly squeeze the cookie into the cutter). Using your fingers or a small, flat surface (I use the end of my rolling pin), press the cookie to both flatten it and so it takes the shape of the cutter. Very quickly repeat with all the cookies on the baking tray.

Sprinkle the cookies with caster sugar and then let them cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, sit the underside of the cookie in a small bowl of caster sugar and transfer to a cooling rack, top side down. The base of the cookie will be the top side of the finished sugared Welsh Cake Cookie.

To bake later: cover the uncooked dough balls with cling film and refrigerate until you are ready to cook them. Follow the same instructions as above.

If you want to freeze any, before cooking, now is the time: cover with cling film and place in the freezer. As soon as the dough balls are solid, they can be transferred into labelled freezer bags or containers.

Eat as they are or spread with some salted butter, ideally Welsh!