Chocolate crispies (from Miranda Gore Browne’s ‘Biscuit’ (Ebury, 2012)

As this week as is the last week before we go into Lent I was intending to roll my sleeves up and try Miranda Gore Browne’s Spicy Jaffa Biscuits. To make these you have to make a tray of spicy orange jelly, then produce a sponge base and finally, when the jelly is placed on the sponge, you add melted chocolate cooled just enough to sit on the jellied sponge without melting the jelly. It’s this latter process that gives me some trepidation  –  if I add the  melted chocolate and it’s not cooled enough, will I have to go back and start again? Well, having been in London overnight and only having a short time for cooking on Saturday afternoon, I cowardly abandoned what might be a fiddly recipe and resorted to Miranda’s chocolate crispies which is not only the easiest recipe in the world but – apart from melting various ingredients in a saucepan on top of the stove – involves no serious cooking. Wonderfully quick to make, these also made sure we had a good  nugget of chocolate  on the last Sunday before we enter Lent.

Ingredients

110 g unsalted butter

110 g golden caster sugar

3 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp syrup

1 tbsp milk

100 g cornflakes

25 g crushed pecans (optional)

50 g glacé Morello cherries (optional)

Chocolate crispies (from Miranda Gore Browne’s ‘Biscuit’ (Ebury, 2012)

Makes about 24 bite-sized crispies or 12 big ones and you will need the appropriate size paper cases – I ran out of the little ones, so had to resort to a filling 4 fairy cake size cases.

Put butter, sugar and cocoa powder, syrup and milk in a good size pan over a low heat and stir until completely melted. Don’t let it boil.

Using a wooden spoon, mix in the cornflakes a little at a time until they are well coated (I like to bash the cornflakes down so they’re not too big).

Put you paper cases into muffin tins and use a teaspoon to fill each case with the mixture.

Chill overnight. Remove from the fridge just  before eating. (If any remain, store in the fridge.)

I added cherries and pecans to make this a bit more sophisticated. In general I found these crispies a bit too sweet and wondered if they would be nicer made from melted 70% cocoa solid chocolate, rather than cocoa and syrup. They did, however, disappear from the plate in record time and nobody seemed to have any complaints.

Daughter No 1 is, as I have said before is a political journalist and, being concerned how few young people think voting is worthwhile, takes every opportunity to encourage people in this group to try to spend some time considering today’s important issues. I met up with her in London at her hairdressers only to discover she’d been talking about this to the young people working there, most of whom expressed their disengagement with the coming general election. voteforpolicies.org.uk is a useful site for comparisons of parties’ policies on many issues, although it should be remembered that party manifestoes have yet to be announced. There are also certain provisos about its use, as there’s a certain pie in the sky element over the costing (there’s only a certain amount of money, push for one policy and money may well have to come from another policy you approve of). But if it gives younger voters a way in to considering the main issues, that must be a good thing.