Condensed Milk Flapjacks

AKA, on the Carnation website, as Cherry Berry Fruit Bars

I recently noticed a part-used can of condensed milk lurking at the back of the fridge. It's a real bore picking recipes which use part of a can, because a) you don't want to bake another recipe using it too soon after the first and b) you can never find a recipe which uses the exact amount you have left over!

Searching for something which used about 2/3 of a can, I came across this recipe on the Carnation web-site. The whole recipe uses a full can, but I figured if I cut it down in size I could get away with what I had. Calculations of baking tin sizes made me realise I couldn't get away with 2/3 of all the ingredients, but could use 4/5 of everything in a 8" sqaure tin. This left me a little short of condensed milk, so I added an extra heaped tablespoon of golden syrup to compensate.

This recipe was absolutely packed with dried fruit and seeds. My usual flapjack recipe uses much less, and I've always wondered how much more it would take, and still hold together. Judging by this I could add a lot more to offset the butter and sugars! I used dried fruit from a pack of Cherries and Berries, rather than just cherries and cranberries, but  other than that I used dried apricots, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, as suggested.

The condensed milk gave a lovely gooey, chewy texture to the flapjacks and combined with the brown sugar and syrup to give a toffee flavour, but I felt the amount of fruit and seeds overwhelmed all of this. I actually prefer a flapjack recipe with less add-ins and more of the flavour of oats and golden syrup. So although this was a delicious fruit-loaded bar, I don't think it will replace my usual recipe when I want flapjacks.

Halva Flapjacks

This Dan Lepard recipe for flapjacks using tahini and condensed milk had a mixed reception. Hubs and I both really liked it, but I had made it primarily for FB's lunchboxes, and she didn't like it one bit! Which left us with a lot to eat, when we are both watching our waistlines, in a bid to stop further expansion. FB is not happy with lots of nuts, and, although I used mixed seeds instead of the nuts in the recipe, to her, the combination of tahini and the seeds tasted 'too nutty'.

The point of using the tahini, if you look at the link, is to reduce the amount of butter used, but there is still an awful lot of sugar in this recipe - so it's not for the calorie conscious! As usual, I made a few changes to the recipe, out of necessity - to replace the walnuts I used 50g each of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and in place of 100g dates I used a mix of equal parts of dates, sultanas and cranberries. I used the full amount of oats mentioned and baked the flapjack in a 20cm tin, but think a slightly larger one would have been better - perhaps 22cm.

As I said, Hubs and I really liked this flapjack - the basic flavour was exactly like the sesame halva which my mother-in-law used to put in food parcels when she visited us*, with the added bonus of more textures and flavours from the oats, dried fruits and seeds. The fudginess produced by the tahini, sugars, butter and condensed milk makes these much different to most flapjacks

* My nominally Jewish MIL, with whom I had a very good relationship, was a fantastic cook and inspired me to cook properly when Hubs and I first married. She insisted on giving food parcels on visits - some delightful goodies like smoked salmon, salami, halva, biscuits and homemade cheesecake, but also nasty chocolates imported from Israel and manky over ripe fruit bought cheap at her local markets. We had to thank her nicely, wait until she had gone, and then ruthlessly throw a lot of the stuff away!