Chocolate and Cherry Flapjack

I hate to waste food, a trait probably handed down from my mother, who started her married life just after WWII, so had to deal with rationing and food shortages. Over the years I've become quite good at not buying more perishable food than we will need before the next shopping trip, and I've been known to decide what to cook for dinner on the basis of half a tin of tomatoes which needs using up. I'm also not a slave to 'use-by' dates unless it's on something potentially dangerous such as shellfish or chicken - old cheese will have the edges cut off, and yogurt will be eaten until it begins to fizz.

So 100mls of chocolate fudge sauce, made mostly of chocolate, with a touch of butter, milk and golden syrup, had to be used somehow. I considered rippling it through vanilla cake batter, or spreading it over a pastry tart base and topping it with a frangipane mixture, but in the end decided to make a small batch of flapjack, using the sauce in place of some of the butter and sweeteners. I added 100g dried cherries for flavour and texture, and ended up with a really tasty version of my usual flapjack recipe. It was a little softer than usual, but a few more minutes in the oven would have remedied that!

My usual recipe would be to melt 160g butter, 65g golden syrup and 100g light brown muscovado sugar together, before stirring in 240g rolled oats and 100g dried fruit and nuts.

I reduced the butter to 120g, the syrup to 50g and the sugar to 50g, and added the chocolate sauce at the melting stage. After the oats and cherries were added, the mixture was transferred to a 20cm (8") square tin, lined with baking parchment, and baked at 180c for 25 minutes. The flapjack was marked into bars while still warm, but cooled completely in the tin before removal.