Chocolate Hazelnut Tart

- for the final We Should Cocoa

We Should Cocoa, a monthly link-up for chocolate recipes started 8 years ago, when Tin & Thyme was still Chocolate Log Blog, and Choclette shared her hosting duties with Chele at Chocolate Teapot. Amazingly, I have been participating since the first link-up, although not very regularly recently. According to my records, I've contributed to 65 out of a possible 95 events. This month will be the 96th We Should Cocoa - and Choclette has decided to call a halt.

For many years the link-up had a theme, so I decided to check on the first, in August 2010. It turned out to be raspberries. I made Chocolate Frangipane Tartlettes with chocolate pastry and raspberry jam in the base - a kind of chocolate bakewell tart. At the same time, I made some similar tartlettes, with Nutella in the base, which we preferred. I thought it would be a fitting end to these events to base my entry on the first thing I made, so decided to go with a tart with Nutella in the base and a hazelnut frangipane on top. I also added more chocolate to the filling, so that the final tart had both the chocolate and hazelnut flavours of the Nutella ramped up.

Ingredients
Pastry
150g plain flour
100g butter
25g icing sugar
25g cocoa
1 egg yolk
cold water to mix

Filling
110g softened butter
110g caster sugar
1 egg + 1 egg white
1 tablespoon plain flour
110g ground hazelnuts
150g chocolate hazelnut spread
25g plain chocolate (I used 100% cacao) grated*

to finish - 40g plain chocolate (about 70%)

* 100% cacao is very hard, and when grated on a fine microplane grater, 25g goes a long way. If you are using  70% plain chocolate, or a coarse grater, you might need as much as 50g to get enough grated chocolate to cover the base.

Method

Make the pastry by sifting the icing sugar and cocoa into the flour, then rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolk and enough cold water to make a soft but not sticky dough, kneading briefly. Shape the dough into a disc, wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for 15 minutes. Roll out the dough thinly and  line a 20cm (8") tart tin. Refrigerate again while you make the filling.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Put a baking sheet into the oven while it is heating.

Cream the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy, then slowly beat in the egg, egg white and flour. Fold in the ground hazelnuts.

Warm the chocolate spread slightly (just a few seconds in the microwave, or in a bowl over hot water) and spread over the base of the pastry case, then sprinkle over the grated chocolate. Spoon the hazelnut frangipane filling into the pastry case and spread evenly.

Put the tart onto the preheated baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 180C and bake for a further 25 minutes until the frangipane is set and golden in colour. Cool in the tin.

Finish the tart by melting the 40g of plain chocolate and drizzling it over the cool tart - I put the chocolate into a small plastic bag, then put that into a mug of hot water (seal the bag first, of course). When the chocolate has melted, snip off one corner of the bag to allow the chocolate to dribble out.

This tart was delicious! The extra dark chocolate in the base cut through the sweetness of the chocolate hazelnut spread, and the hazelnut flavour of the frangipane came through strongly. The only thing wrong was that the frangipane appeared to have separated a little as it cooked, leaving a pale set custard-y layer at the bottom. Although this didn't affect the flavour, it did affect the appearance; I have no idea what went wrong.

So, it's the end of an era! I'm sending this recipe to the very last We Should Cocoa link-up. Although I don't bake as much now as I did 8 years ago, I can thank WSC for stretching both my skills and my imagination. Over the years I've used ingredients that I would never have thought to pair with chocolate (some more successfully than others, I must admit) and tackled more complex recipes than I would usually handle. I believe Chocolette intends to keep the WSC archive, and has a Pinterest board, so we can still look there for inspiration.

Thank you for 8 years of fun, Choclette!

Salted Caramel, Chocolate and Hazelnut Shortbread Squares

With the demise of the Clandestine Cake Club - which I think is continuing as just a Facebook page - a few of the local members decided to try and keep a group going on our own. For our first meeting I decided to stick to a familiar recipe rather than experiment. Now that we are no longer bound by CCC rules of large cakes only, and as the attendance wasn't going to be huge, I decided to make a traybake of shortbread squares filled with a fudgy layer of salted caramel and chocolate, following  this recipe which I have used before. Using this recipe also meant that any leftovers would keep for longer than a cake would - I already have too much cake in the freezer!

I followed the recipe exactly as written in the link above, so no need to write it out again. In the end, there were only a few pieces left for me to bring home, but they were as delicious as the first time round!

Edited to add that this recipe went to June's We Should Cocoa link-up, at Tin and Thyme.

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Fudge Squares

I found myself with half a tin of caramelised condensed milk, and no idea what to make with it. One thing that kept coming up, however inventively I worded my internet searches, was Millionaires' Shortbread, and similar bakes. The problem with many ready-made caramel products is that they often aren't thick enough to work really well in things like Millionaires Shortbread - I hate cutting into something only to see the caramel squidge out all over the plate.

However, the recipes made me wonder if mixing the caramel with melted chocolate would mean that it set more solidly after baking, and decided that it couldn't hurt to try. I then decided to pair the chocolate-caramel mixture with my favourite, really easy, shortbread recipe - from Sue Lawrence's 'On Baking' - and ended up with the components of a Millionaires' Shortbread with much less work. I also added some salt flakes and some hazelnuts for extra flavour.

Ingredients
170g unsalted butter
85g caster sugar
170g SR flour
170g semolina
60g coarsely chopped hazelnuts
pinch salt flakes

filling - 200g caramelised condensed milk, at room temperature
100g of plain chocolate (the darker the better - I used Willie's Chef's Drops; although they are just 70% cocoa solids they are quite bitter when eaten on their own, so ideal for adding to caramel)
1/2 teaspoon salt flakes

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 190C and line a 20cm (8") square baking tin with baking parchment, using one piece of paper to come up the sides of the tin too.
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water and allow  to cool a little, if necessary, to around 40C (blood heat). Mix in the caramelised condensed milk and the salt.
Melt the butter and sugar together, either in a large bowl in the microwave, or a large pan on the hob. Add the flour and the semolina and mix everything together to give a crumbly rubble.
Put 2/3 of the mixture into the baking tin and spread evenly, pressing down firmly so that it looks like a sheet of dough rather than rubble.
Spread on the chocolate mixture, stopping just short of the edges.
Mix the hazelnuts into the remaining dough, and sprinkle this over the contents of the baking tin, this time only pressing down lightly.
Sprinkle over a pinch more salt, then bake for 30 minutes until the topping is firm and golden.
Leave for 30 minutes to give the chocolate layer time to set a bit, then mark into squares. Leave in the baking tin until completely cold, as the squares are too fragile to move while hot.

These were really tasty! The centre was rich and fudgy, but because it was a thin layer it didn't seem over-sweet. The shortbread layers were, as usual, crisp, but with a 'melt-in the mouth' delicacy. The added salt was just the right amount and the hazelnuts added to both the texture and flavour. 

These weren't quite successful as replacement for Millionaires' Shortbread, with it's separate layer of caramel, as the caramel flavour wasn't really strong when mixed with the chocolate, but what this means is that these could probably be made with basic condensed milk to give the same fudgy filling, without much loss of flavour.

I'm adding these to April's We Should Cocoa link-up, over at Tin and Thyme. Choclette doesn't set a theme for this link-up - any recipe, using any form of chocolate is welcome.

Date and Ginger Chocolate Chip Biscuits

Biscuits aren't one of my favourite things to make; in general there's too much faffing about to make them worth the effort. They might look more decorative but you can usually get the same amount of eating pleasure from a traybake cut into squares or bars, with lots less work for the cook. However, put the name Dan Lepard to a biscuit recipe, and it's one I'll look at twice, and by the second time I'll probably be eagerly searching the storecupboard, to check I've got all the ingredients. It's no coincidence that this is my second biscuit bake this year (see here), and they are both Dan's recipes - previously I hadn't made any biscuits since July last year!

I think it must be the (sometimes unusual) combinations of flavours that Dan uses, and that he tries to maximise the impact of those flavours, which makes his recipes so appealing to me. In this case, I love the combination of dates with chocolate, and ginger with chocolate, as well as dates and ginger, but the only time I've ever used the three ingredients together is in another Dan Lepard recipe - Chocolate Passion Cake, where the dates were used as an egg replacement rather than a flavouring ingredient.

These Date and Ginger Chocolate Chip Biscuits, published on the Good Food, Australia site, were relatively quick and easy to make, as the method is based on melting butter and sugar together, before mixing in the other ingredients. I used cocoa, rather than carob, and dark muscovado sugar but otherwise followed the recipe exactly.

I portioned out the biscuit dough using scales, and got 21 biscuits out of the mix, not the 24 suggested in the recipe. As I was using the fan oven, so that I could put in two trays of biscuits together, I cooked for the minimum time suggested.

These biscuits were as delicious as I expected. Rich in chocolate flavour, with large chunks of fiery ginger which were a delight to chew on. I find dates quite neutral in flavour (which is why they're often used as a sugar replacement these days) but I think that they really enhance the impact of chocolate and they certainly contributed to the chewiness of these biscuits.

This shows how the chocolate melted and tried to escape!

My only slight disappointment with the biscuits was that any chocolate chunks on the outside of the dough ball melted during baking, leaving a lot of melted chocolate on the baking paper, and on top of some of the biscuits. This might be down to my choice of chocolate, but as these biscuits were really only chunks of chocolate, dates, and ginger held together with the minimum amount of dough, it would be difficult to make them without any chocolate chips on the surface. I've not looked into bake-stable chocolate in detail, as I've never really needed it, but my impression is that it's quite expensive - possibly only for perfectionists, which I'm not!


I'm sending these to Choclette's We Should Cocoa link-up for March, over at Tin and Thyme. There is no theme to the link-up, any recipe, using any form of chocolate, is welcome.

Chestnut Flour Brownies - 2

gluten- and dairy-free.

After my earlier, not entirely successful, experimentation with chestnut flour (see previous post), I looked back over all my brownie recipes to see which one might be best adapted to use chestnut flour in place of flour containing gluten. I soon found this Diana Henry recipe for brownies made with rye flour, which is lower in gluten than wheat flour. This made me think the recipe might work as well with a gluten-free flour, so I tried a straight swap of flours, using chestnut flour instead of rye, and also added 3 chopped marrons glacé instead of the nuts suggested (you could add more, but they are very expensive!). I also used a hard dairy-free baking fat (eg Stork) instead of butter, as I was still trying to make the brownies both gluten- and dairy-free

The batter was a lot stiffer than I remembered it being in the original recipe, and really difficult to spread, so I was worried that the brownies might be too solid. However, the baked brownies were fine - quite delicious, in fact. They were dense, chewy and fudgy - everything a good brownie should be. They also tasted as if they had a lot more chocolate in them than they actually did, but without being too rich, as in my last recipe. The little pieces of candied chestnuts added an extra dimension to both the flavour and the texture.

I suspected that the stiff batter was down to the chestnut flour absorbing more moisture than rye flour, although none of the baking recipes using chestnut flour that I've looked at suggest that any adjustment is necessary. So I tried the recipe for a second time, adding 2 tablespoons of water to the batter, which made it easier to spread in the tin, but also made the brownies a little less fudgy and added a few minutes to the baking time.

My only slight disappointment with both batches of chestnut brownies was that I didn't really pick up any flavour components that I could attribute to the chestnut flour. Yes, the brownies were delicious, but would they have been any less delicious if made with spelt or rye flour? As chestnut flour is so expensive, I don't think it's something that I'll bother to keep in stock, unless I find a recipe which showcases it's flavour.

I'm sending these brownies to Choclette's 'We Should Cocoa' link-up for December, over at Tin and Thyme. Chocolate is always associated with Christmas, but adding chestnuts to these brownies makes them even more seasonal.

Chocolate, Date and Walnut Bars

 Looking back over my blog posts I can see that it's been well over six years since I last made these. For me, that's one of the downsides of blogging - if you're usually trying to bake something new to write about, a lot of very good things often fall by the wayside.

These bars fit somewhere between a brownie and a cake; they are dense and chewy, but with a lot of the bulk being provided by dates, rather than butter and sugar, they are not as rich and guilt-inducing as brownies. The recipe comes from 'Wicked Chocolate' by Jane Suthering, and originally used 50:50 orange juice and water to soften the dates, but I couldn't taste the orange in the final cake, so decided it was a waste to use it. There is also a chocolate and yogurt frosting in the recipe (see my original post), but I'm not keen on the extra calories in frostings on things that are perfectly good enough without.

Ingredients

225g stoneless dates (chopped in halves widthways to check for stones - I always find at least one!)
250mls water
170g plain chocolate, around 70%, chopped roughly
115g softened butter
115g light muscovado sugar
2 large eggs
170g SR flour
115g walnuts, coarsely chopped

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 190C/170C fan. Line a 30 x 20cm(12 x 8") baking tin with baking parchment.
Put the dates and water into a small pan and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 5 minutes to soften the dates, then remove from the heat and add the chocolate. (Note - not all the water is absorbed during the softening process.) Stir until the chocolate has melted.
Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the eggs, one at a time, with a tablespoon of the weighed flour.
Fold in the rest of the flour, followed by the chocolate mixture and lastly, the nuts.
Transfer the batter to the baking tin and spread evenly, then bake for around 20 minutes, until risen and firm.
Cool in the tin.
Cut into bars when cold. The original recipe suggests 24 pieces but I cut the cake into 18 bars.

Leaving the dates in quite large pieces means that there are noticeable chunks of them in the bars. If you wanted the bulk of the dates without the texture and flavour, I'd suggest chopping them more finely before cooking them, to make a coarse purée which then 'disappears' into the cake batter, as in a sticky toffee pudding.

As this is the only chocolate recipe I've made this month, I'm sending this to November's We Should Cocoa link-up at Tin and Thyme. Choclette has changed We Should Cocoa recently, so that any recipes including chocolate can be added; there is no longer a theme to follow.

Fudgy Chocolate and Pistachio Slice

I intended to bake this recipe, for mocha brownies on a shortbread base, but when I found myself with half a packet of digestive biscuits which needed to be used up, I decided to put the fudgy topping from the recipe onto a biscuit crumb base instead.

I think I used about 150g of biscuits and 75g melted butter to make the crumb base, which I pressed into the base of a 20cm ( 8") square baking tin, and chilled while I made the topping. The mixture for the topping was very easy to put together, as it is based on a can of condensed milk.

To a 400g can of condensed milk add: 30g plain flour, 1 large egg, 65g cocoa, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 2 teaspoons of instant coffee dissolved in 1 tablespoon of hot water. When this is evenly combined, fold in 75g of chopped nuts - in this case I used pistachios. Spread the mixture over the crumb base and bake at 180C for about 25 minutes until the centre is set. Cool in the tin and cut into squares or fingers when cold.

These little treats were delicious. The topping is like a really fudgy sweet brownie, as you'd expect from using a can of condensed milk. My only criticism was that the amount of crumb base wasn't enough. I used the amount of biscuits I had available, but if I made these again I would use more biscuits and butter to make a thicker base.

I'm sending this to October's We Should Cocoa link-up, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme. Any recipe containing some form of chocolate is welcome to be added.

Chocolate Chip and Peanut Butter Blondies

The classic combination of peanut butter and chocolate, and a recipe from Green and Black's website. I have one of their chocolate recipe books (Unwrapped), but this recipe isn't in it. I found this while checking whether another of the recipes from the book was online, and decided it looked worth trying

I made these blondies primarily for my son, who doesn't get home-baking very often now that he's away from home. Of course, I had to make sure they were OK before passing them on to him, so after dividing the tray into 16 pieces, he got 12 and we had two each! I liked them a lot, although it looked, in the couple of pieces I tried, that some of the white chocolate had melted into the batter, rather than staying in lumps. He liked them enough to email me to say how good they were!

I only made one change to the recipe - I didn't have crunchy peanut butter, but wanted to add the crunch of nuts, so I used 125g of smooth peanut butter and 30g of finely chopped  roasted (but unsalted) peanuts.

Blondies nearly always turn out more cakey than brownies, because you don't have melted chocolate to give a fudgy texture, but this recipe was on the dense end of the spectrum, rather than the light and sponge-y end. This is definitely a recipe to make again!


Because these were so good, I'm adding them to September's We Should Cocoa link-up. After 6 years, Choclette at Tin and Thyme has changed the format of WSC; instead of setting a theme each month, anything containing some form of chocolate can be added. I'm a little sad to lose the challenge that WSC gave me - I baked many things, and used many odd combinations of ingredients, that I wouldn't have thought of trying without needing to bake for WSC.

Tahini Brownies with a Sesame Praline Crust

I recently bought both tahini and sesame snaps for a cake recipe which I then decided not to make, so I had to think of another use for them. This recipe for tahini brownies with a sesame praline crust was the result. None of the sesame/tahini brownie recipes I could find online were quite what I was looking for - many used tahini to make dairy-free brownies and even more were so-called 'healthy' brownies, using raw ingredients or unusual grains instead of wheat flour. All I wanted was brownies with the flavour of sesame seeds!

In the end, I took inspiration from my recipe for brownies with a hazelnut praline crust, substituting tahini for some of the butter, and grinding the sesame snaps to make a praline topping. The results were very good - the brownies were very soft and gooey, and although the tahini flavour in the brownies wasn't very strong, the topping more than made up for this, adding a sweetened sesame flavour and crunch..

Ingredients
100g sesame snaps
90g butter
140g 70% plain chocolate
50g tahini
300g light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
160g plain flour
3 tablespoons cocoa

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line a 20cm/8" square brownie tin with baking parchment.
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a large mixing bowl, over a pan of simmering water.
While this is happening, use a food processor or pestle and mortar to grind the sesame snaps to a fine praline crumb.
When the butter and chocolate has melted, stir in the tahini, followed by the sugar. Stir until smooth and evenly blended, then beat in the eggs, one at a time.
Sieve the flour and cocoa over the chocolate mix, and fold in.
Transfer the batter to the prepared tin and level the mixture, then sprinkle the sesame praline evenly over the batter.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, until a probe comes out with just a few damp crumbs sticking to it.
Cool before cutting into pieces of the desired size.

As this is the only chocolate baking I've done this month, and I was so pleased with the result, I'm sending this to August's We Should Cocoa link-up, hosted this month by Choclette at Tin and Thyme. As for July, the theme is 'Anything Goes'

Chocolate Cake with White Chocolate and Mascarpone Buttercream

My son and I both have July birthdays, and we are both chocoholics, which makes decisions on birthday cakes very easy. What's not so easy is finding something new and 'special' to make each year. I was in the process of looking for this year's cake when this recipe from Dan Lepard popped up on my Facebook page. I still miss Dan's weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, so the fact that he has new recipes appearing occasionally on Australian Good Food is very exciting for me. Even though I'm not a big fan of white chocolate (neither eating it nor using it), this cake seemed just what I was looking for, so I was prepared to try white chocolate once more.

My first problem, after reading the recipe, was finding solid-based deep sponge tins. After finding only one brand in my local cookware shop, at £10 a tin, I went for a cheap supermarket brand. I bought 3 tins for less than £10 - my thinking, which proved correct, was that they weren't very deep, so I would probably need to make three layers, rather than two. Incidentally, another surprise, while shopping, was to notice that silicone bakeware has almost disappeared from the marketplace. I've never been a big fan of silicone for large cakes as the early examples were too flexible, and bulged in the wrong places, but  I thought those problems had been overcome. I didn't realise the trend had passed altogether!

The second problem was that the three cakes didn't rise very evenly, probably due to uneven heating. Although I was using the fan oven to cook all three cakes at the same time, two of the cakes were on the same shelf and quite near to the walls of the oven. These irregularities were overcome, when assembling the cake, by slicing an off-centre bulge off one cake, carefully positioning the bottom two cakes so that the overall effect was level, and choosing the best cake for the top layer.

Apart from that everything went smoothly, even though it was quite an unconventional recipe. I decided to use sunflower oil rather than olive oil, but that was the only change I made to the ingredients. Once the cake batter was made and divided between three tins, using scales for accuracy, they only needed 25 minutes in the oven.

I was really careful when melting the white chocolate for the buttercream, as I've always had problems in the past. I used Green and Black's White Cooking Chocolate, as it had the highest levels of cocoa solids of all the brands I could find. I put the bowl of chocolate over a pan of just boiled water and removed it when the chocolate was about 2/3 melted, so that it didn't overheat. I was also careful not to overbeat the mixture when adding the mascarpone and white chocolate to the basic buttercream, as mentioned in the recipe. The recipe made more than enough buttercream to fill and top the three cakes - I still had leftovers, even with the additional layer! Just to finish off, I topped the cake with a dusting of grated 100% cacao

I was very pleased with this cake; the cake layers were dark, rich, tender and very moist - everything you want in a special occasion chocolate cake! The buttercream didn't seem as sweet as I expected, possibly because of the addition of the mascarpone, and complimented the bitter notes of the cake very well. Green and Black's White Cooking Chocolate contains quite a lot of vanilla, and this additional flavour worked well in the buttercream too.

I'm sending this cake to July's We Should Cocoa event, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme. Choclette also has a July birthday, as do many of her friends and family, so wants participants in this long-running event to just celebrate July with chocolate! Anything goes, as far as a theme is concerned, as long as it's celebratory, so my birthday cake should fit in well!

Malted Chocolate Cake

for We Should Cocoa

The added ingredient for this month's We Should Cocoa event, hosted by Green Gourmet Giraffe, is malt. The idea of We Should Cocoa, which originated from Choclette at Tin and Thyme, is to pair chocolate, in some form, with the added ingredient or theme chosen by each month's host.

My first (and only!) idea was to use malted milk powder in a chocolate cake, so I bought an individual sachet of Horlicks; it was then that I found that most recipes used upwards of a quarter of a cup of malted milk powder - more than I had.

After a lot of searching, I found two versions of a Peyton and Byrne cake on two of the blogs I read regularly - Tin and Thyme (a fitting coincidence) and The More Than Occasional Baker - which only used a tablespoon of malted milk powder, so I used this as my starting point. The sachet of Horlicks I had looked as if it contained about 2 tablespoons, and I used 40g of malt extract in place of 40g of the dark muscovado sugar in the recipe, to increase the maltiness. In the absence of any milk chocolate in the storecupboard, I used white chocolate.

I followed the method in the recipe I found on The More Than Occasional Baker, as it was so unusual that I thought it must be nearest to the original. It might have been that my loaf tin was too short and deep, but I found the cake took 60 minutes to cook, rather than the 35-40 minutes suggested in the recipe (something Choclette at Tin and Thyme found too).

Ingredients
70g light muscovado sugar
70g dark muscovado sugar
40g malt extract
140g SR flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
32g (1 individual sachet) Horlicks malted milk powder
125g softened butter, in small pieces
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
50g plain chocolate, melted
110mls milk
75g white chocolate, chopped

Method
Preheat oven to 170C and line a 2lb loaf tin with baking parchment.
Combine the sugars, malt extract, flour, salt and malted milk powder in a large bowl.
Add the butter and beat with a hand-held mixer, on a slow speed, until evenly combined.
Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat until light and fluffy, then beat in the melted chocolate and milk until evenly combined.
Stir in the white chocolate pieces and transfer the batter to the baking tin.
Cook until a test probe comes out clean. The original recipe suggested 35-40 minutes, but my loaf took 60 minutes.
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.

I really liked the flavour combination of malt and chocolate, but this particular recipe really didn't work out very well. Although the loaf seemed to rise well in the oven, it sank a lot while cooling and became quite dense. It also dried out a bit around the edges, due to the longer cooking time.

Chocolate Toffee Oaty Squares

This recipe, which featured in Sainsbury's 'The Magazine' in August 1996 is so decadent that I only make it once in a blue moon. One good thing about 20 year old recipes is that they don't come with a nutritional analysis to scare you off completely, but you don't have to be a genius to realise that a traybake containing 200g plain chocolate, 240g Mars bars, 150g butter, 150g sugar and 150ml of double cream is going to contain a lot of calories per piece - and that most of the calories are from fat and sugar.

One thing had to be checked before starting the recipe; my husband has been complaining for ages that one of his favourite chocolate bars - Mars bars - seems smaller these days. He was right! In the 1990s a standard Mars bar weighed around 65g; today the bars in a multi-pack weigh a tad less than 40g. So the 4 bars in the recipe had to be replaced by 6 of today's bars.

The only change I made to the original recipe was to use plain chocolate as the first layer of the filling, rather than milk chocolate. It reduces the sweetness a bit, and increases the contrast between the chocolate and the 'toffee' layers. I cut the squares into a variety of sizes - some large pieces for my son to take home, and smaller pieces for us to eat - but I reckon you should get a minimum of 24 pieces out of the tray, although the recipe recommends 32.

Unless you don't like chocolate, you couldn't fail to enjoy these bars. The oat mixture makes a crisp base, the chocolate layer sets hard and the fudgy toffee layer, which is made from melted Mars bars and cream whisked together, stays melt-in-the-mouth soft - almost like a sauce on top, although it just holds it's shape.

Ingredients
225g plain flour
110g porridge oats
150g light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 medium egg, beaten (I used the smallest from a box of large eggs)
225g deluxe milk chocolate, roughly chopped (I used 70% plain)
150ml double cream
Enough large Mars bars to give close to 240g (don't use mini bars or snack-sized as the proportion of chocolate to filling will be wrong)

Method
The recipe is made in a 9" x 13" (23 x 32cm) shallow tin. The nearest I could get to this, using an adjustable tin, was 10 x 12", which is a tiny bit larger. I lined the tin with baking parchment.

The dough can be made in a food processor, but I made it by hand, by rubbing the butter into the flour, oats, sugar, bicarbonate of soda and salt, then mixing in the egg until the dough held together when squeezed. If using a processor, pulse to cut in the butter, then again to blend in the egg. 3/4 of the dough was spread evenly into the baking tin, and pressed down firmly with the back of a metal spoon.

The 225g of chocolate was melted in a bowl over simmering water, then spread over the base, leaving a 1cm margin all round. The tray was then chilled until the chocolate was set - about 30 minutes in the fridge, or 10 minutes in the freezer.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Bring the double cream to the boil in a small heavy-based pan, then reduce the heat to a minimum and add the chopped Mars bars. Stir until the Mars bars have melted, then whisk until creamy. Pour this over the chocolate layer and spread evenly, leaving a small margin all round the edges, as before.

Crumble the remaining dough mixture over the top, as evenly as possible - there won't be enough to completely cover the surface.

Place the baking tin on a  baking sheet and bake for 25 minutes, then cool in the tin until the toffee has set - at least 2 hours. Cut into small squares.

I decided to push the boat out with these Chocolate Toffee Oaty Squares after Choclette, at Tin and Thyme, chose oats as the additional ingredient for this month's We Should Cocoa link-up. Each month either Choclette or a guest host chooses an ingredient, which must be used with some form of chocolate, to produce a tasty treat. I thought about making one of my chocolate flapjack recipes, but decided that a We Should Cocoa entry needed something a bit more out of the ordinary

Chocolate Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding

The We Should Cocoa cooking link-up, hosted this month by Linzi at Lancashire Food, (WSC is the brainchild of Choclette, at Tin and Thyme, who usually hosts the link-up on alternate months) has the seasonal theme of eggs. The challenge of putting eggs and chocolate together isn't difficult, but I wanted to bake something that relied on eggs for it's substance rather than just choosing a cake with the usual eggs in.

As it was a cold weekend I decided to treat us to a hot dessert rather than make a cake, and the proliferation of Hot Cross Buns in the shops in the run-up to Easter gave me the idea of making a bread and butter pudding with them. This fitted in well with the theme of eggs, as egg custard is an essential component, and adding chocolate to B & B pudding didn't seem a step too far!

The most challenging part of the dessert was slicing the buns thinly! I wanted to retain the crosses on the six buns for the top of the pudding, and still slice the remaining bun in half. Once that was done, I sandwiched the bun slices with butter and ginger jam, cut them in half crossways, and packed the little sandwiches into a buttered baking dish, as you would for a regular bread and butter pudding. I then scattered 50g of chopped dried apricots amongst the buns and placed the slices of bun with the crosses flatly on top. Finding the right sized baking dish is quite important here, so that the pudding looks right!

For the custard, I heated 350mls of semi-skimmed milk to about 60C, so that it would melt 50g plain chocolate when it was added. I then poured the chocolate milk onto 3 eggs and 2 tablespoons caster sugar and whisked together to mix evenly and dissolve the sugar. The custard mix was then poured over the buns in the baking dish and left to stand for an hour or so, to let the eggy mixture soak into the bread.

The pudding was baked for 45 minutes at 180C (160C, fan) and then cooled for about 20 minutes before serving.

This was a tasty dessert, with just enough chocolate to compliment the added ingredients and the fruit and spices already in the Hot Cross Buns without overwhelming them and becoming the dominant flavour. Using ginger jam was a good step, as it contained quite large pieces of preserved ginger to add to the bun spice. Unfortunately, it wasn't very pretty to look at, and I was also photographing it in bad light, so you'll just have to believe me that it tasted better than it looked!

Over a Belleau Kitchen, Dom's Simply Eggcellent link-up this month is a celebration of eggs with a focus on seasonal dishes, including those suitable for Easter. As Easter is early this year and it looks as if it might not be good weather, this hot pudding certainly fits the bill.

Brownies with Salted Chocolate Chunks and Caramelised Biscuit Spread Swirl

Choclette, at Tin and Thyme, has set us the task of baking with chocolate and butter in this month's We Should Cocoa challenge. Whilst I've always been a firm believer in baking with butter, I have had occasion to use substitutes - I experimented quite a lot with oils, when my son was still living at home and on a low-saturated fat diet, and I've used Pure sunflower spread and coconut oil for non-dairy baking. I would say that, in general, substituting baking spreads for butter, or using oil in recipes, works very well, especially in sponge-type cakes, where oils, in particular, make very moist cakes.

However, there are, for me, two categories of baked goods where butter cannot be substituted so successfully. One is flapjacks, where you need a hard fat to get final texture right and where butter is much better for flavour once you go down the route of using saturated fat. The second category is brownies, especially if you like dense fudgy brownies, as I do. With growing evidence that butter is healthier than spreads and baking products based on hardened vegetable oils, there's really no reason not to use butter when baking these types of things. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that it is the amount of sugar that we should be worrying about - whether it's refined cane or beet sugar or sugar from more 'natural' sources, such as honey, maple syrup, or fruit molasses.

Anyway - back to brownies! In the past I've tried brownies made with vegetable oil, mayonnaise and puréed fruit and vegetables in an effort to reduce saturated fat levels, and while the results were usually acceptable, these substitutes made brownies that were lighter and cakier than brownies made with butter. Other than butter, coconut oil gives the best result, but that is because it is an oil with high levels of saturated fat, which makes it my choice for non-dairy brownies,

Having decided to make brownies for this buttery challenge, I looked for ways to make my basic recipe more exciting. I had some  Lotus brand Caramelised Biscuit Spread leftover from Christmas, which I thought would make a good addition to brownies, especially if I could swirl it across the top of them. Because this spread is very sweet, I decided to add some salt to the brownies to offset the sweetness a little. I used a bar of sea-salted milk chocolate, chopped into chunks, in the main part of the batter, and sprinkled a little vanilla/sea-salt mixture on top too.

Ingredients
140g plain chocolate - at least 60% cocoa solids (I used 70%)
140g unsalted butter
300g light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
160g plain flour
3 tablespoons cocoa
100g milk chocolate with added sea-salt (I used Green and Black's)
200g caramelised biscuit spread
1/2 teaspoon sea salt flakes*

*I used vanilla sea-salt, made by adding a split vanilla pod to a cup of flaked sea-salt, in a jar, and leaving it for a couple of weeks, shaking occasionally. The vanilla seeds come out into the salt.

Method
Line a shallow 20cm(8") baking tin with parchment and pre-heat oven to 180C.
Melt the chocolate and butter together, in a large mixing bowl, over a pan of simmering water, then remove the bowl from the heat.
Stir in the sugar, until there are no lumps and the mixture is quite smooth.
If the mixture is more than lukewarm at this stage, let it cool a little more, then add the eggs, one at a time, beating well. Add the vanilla extract.
Sift the flour and cocoa into the chocolate mixture and fold in.
Weigh 150g of batter into a small bowl, and stir the chocolate chunks into the larger portion of batter.
Spread the larger amount of batter into the prepared baking tin.
Weigh the biscuit spread into a microwave-proof bowl and heat for 25 seconds on full power to melt. I got the idea of melting the spread from this recipe on the Biscoff site. (This could probably be done in a small pan over a low heat, if a m/wave isn't available.)
Drizzle the melted biscuit spread over the surface of the brownie batter, letting it spread out naturally to cover as much of the surface as possible.
Pour the remaining brownie batter, in three stripes, across the surface of the biscuit spread, then use the end of a spoon to mix the chocolate batter and biscuit spread into swirls, without going too deep into the main brownie mixture. Using a small amount of the brownie batter on top of the biscuit spread layer in this way makes it easier to swirl the two mixtures together.
Sprinkle the sea-salt flakes over the surface, then bake for about 30 minutes until the brownie mixture has set, and a probe comes out with just a few damp crumbs adhering to it. The biscuit spread will crust over but still be liquid at this point, so don't confuse that with wet batter!
Leave until completely cold before cutting into pieces - the biscuit spread stays liquid for a surprisingly long time!

These brownies were delicious! The salted chocolate chunks, and the small amount of salt sprinkled over the top of the brownies was just enough to subdue the sweetness of the biscuit spread, without the brownies becoming overwhelmingly salty. The biscuit spread itself, as it was in such a thin layer,  was delicately flavoured with cinnamon and caramel, adding just a hint of extra flavour to the brownies. This variation on my basic brownie recipe is definitely something worth repeating!