Part biscuit, part butterscotch, plenty marshmallow and all delicious,
these slices of heaven are hard to pigeonhole into one particular dessert category.
I attempted these more as a bold attempt to try something new than because I
thought they would actually work, although the sugar content alone was promising.
Their picture in Cake Days by the
Hummingbird Bakery had been staring at me tantalisingly since I first opened
those magical pages, and one average day in February I finally decided to accept
the challenge.
Let’s start with the bedrock supporting all that sugary joy.
Actually, sugar plays an important role in the biscuit base, which contains
plain flour, butter and icing sugar, rubbed together to form a dough. This is
much easier to do if the butter is soft because you remembered to get it out of
the fridge before you started. I did not. I’m not very good at getting butter
to that optimum state that lies somewhere between solid enough to serve as some
form of hammer and melted yellow pool. Microwaves, ovens and most recently
radiators have all lured me into trusting them with my precious block of fatty
goodness only to turn it into a mess and me into That Person who screams at kitchen
appliances. The moral of the story is,
take the butter out of the fridge really far in advance, and never trust radiators
with your food.
After that cautionary tale, we return to sugar, specifically
the icing sugar in these biscuits. The Hummingbird Bakery has pulled off
another genius move with this one. The fine, powdery texture of icing sugar
leaves you with a biscuit that holds together neatly until you bite into it,
when it just starts to crumble and release that delicate sweetness. You know
when you open the bag of icing sugar, or try to mix it into butter, or even
just look at a sealed box of the stuff, and it releases that puff that engulfs
the room with a cloud of sugar? It’s like eating that, but without the choking
and the coating of white dust that gets over everything, like ash from a
particularly tasty volcano. It’s welldocumented that angels don’t bake and have
too much self-control to eat dessert (and besides they’re contracted to Angel’s
Delight and Philadelphia cheese), but if they did, they would be making and
eating biscuits that taste like this.
If the concept of a crumbling, sweet biscuit layer has your
mouth watering in a slightly undignified manner, consider the ingredients in
this next part. The butterscotch is made of two types of sugar, golden syrup,
butter, vanilla essence, crunchy peanut butter and double cream. Well, instead
of cream I used soya milk, but with that much sugar there really wasn’t very
much that could go wrong. Surprisingly, this theory held out throughout the
rather intimidating process of getting the solution of sugars, golden syrup and
water to the soft boil stage, which involves lots of bubbling, flooding of hobs,
more bubbling, and tentative prodding of the angry-looking mixture.
I’d never made butterscotch before so I had no idea what to
expect, although with that much sugar I assumed it would be tasty. Rather than
over thinking it, I trusted the good book, performed a standard ritual dance
and made a small sacrifice to the baking gods. They must have been on side
because when it set, the bubbling, boiling mess had turned into smooth, edible,
fall-apart-in-the-mouth butterscotch.
The really fun part of the process was testing to see if it
was at soft-boil stage, which was a bit like being in a science lesson at
school. The teacher tells you the probable outcome of an experiment and lets
you get on with it. You hover over the chemicals, which look dubiously
unreactive, and then, suddenly, everything bursts into life and there you are
with a blaring fire alarm and a chunk of gold. Actually, in this case, you drop
a tiny amount of the boiling mixture into a cup of cold water and watch in
wonder as the little translucent bubbles the book so sincerely promised form
before your very eyes.
The final aspects of this multilayered slice of joy were the
marshmallows and nuts. The recipe recommended using 100g of marshmallows. I
never thought that I would come out with the following statement, since it
contradicts both the wise words of the Hummingbird Bakery and my own understanding
of the world, but existential crises aside, that’s too many marshmallows. By
the time I was through they looked like desperate pasty people jostling for
space in the park on that one record-breaking hot day in summer. I will put marshmallows
in any food going (except lasagne, that’s a crime) but these slices were just
crying out for a health and safety inspector to declare them overfull.
Since the marshmallows were dominating the space, there wasn’t
much room left for the peanuts. Any type of nut would have been fine but I only
had these, and they are the friendliest members of the nut world. I managed to
cajole and squeeze a few in, along with some dried cranberries for extra
colour, but next time there will be a more equal distribution of ingredients.
That being said, the marshmallows were the perfect texture for the
butterscotch, since the warm mixture melted them slightly and gave them that
just-off-the-bonfire chewiness even when the whole thing had been left to cool
overnight. The nuts and cranberries added a bit of substance to the ethereal,
sugary heaven, like that sensible but necessary voice that reminds you to eat
the lettuce that comes with the cheeseburger and to zip up your pockets before
you get on the rollercoaster.
If you’re looking for a challenge and mountain climbing
seems like far too much effort, the butterscotch in this recipe requires attention
but no spectacular skill level. Once you’ve got past that task, the taste of victory
is sweet, melt-in-the-mouth, and devilishly divine.
