Hijacked by cake

I have a problem. I don't consciously think about cake, but there it always is, hovering just out of sight, ready to skip into view when I'm least expecting it. I haven't had a spare second to even think about baking anything of late and although I intended to spend last weekend working on my new-look, new-name blog, I got sucked into the great black hole that is the archive in my spare room. I took on the task of finishing off an archiving project that had first commenced in 2010. The last of the boxes are finally available to be processed for the national archaeological archive and I was offered the job. I took it on in my spare time and took the dusty boxes into my spare room (why oh why?!). Weeks of procrastination later, the musty smell and dust motes creeping out from the beneath the closed doorway forced me to take action. Before I knew it, much of the weekend had disappeared and I was coated in a layer of decades old dust and dirt (archaeological field sheets, notes and plans get written or drawn up on site and are frequently - and sometimes liberally - coated with dried mud). 

So, no time or thought for baking, but I did manage to make a fresh batch of granola - a necessary occupation as I had run out the previous week. Making your own granola might seem a luxury if you're pressed for time or in fact, might be something you've never even considered, but home-made granola is something I will nearly always have in the cupboard. It's yummy (most importantly), nutritious and as healthy as you want to make it. This particular recipe is so delicious that No.1 Sister had to stop making it - her husband would just eat it by the (large) handful every time he passed the dresser where the tub was stored and it would be gone in a flash. Nothing at all wrong with eating it just like that (I sometimes bring a bag of it in the car so I can), but I tend to have it with berries and yoghurt for breakfast or sprinkled on top of porridge (highly recommended). It's also good with rhubarb or stewed apple and custard or you could convert it into a crumble topping if you need a quick dessert. 

Home-made Granola

The original recipe was printed in Nigella's Feast, but I don't think I've ever used even half the amount of sweeteners as are in the original. I usually reduce the amount (or even eliminate altogether) some of the sugar / syrup / honey and increase the amount of stewed apple / apple compote. Making your own means you can also use whatever nuts, seeds and dried fruit takes your fancy. For me, no nasty raisins (I don't like them in granola any more than in muesli and my views on that were made very clear in an earlier post), but I do add extra seeds and coconut, either regular desiccated or the big flakes you get in the health food shop. There's ginger and cinnamon, lots of tasty oats and all you have to do is mix it all up together and bake in the oven, giving it a quick shovel every 10 mins or so, to make sure it bakes evenly into crunchy clusters and crispy flakes.

Anyhow, granola recipes aside (find it below if you'd like to try it), there I was, dusty and tired with not a thought of cake or baking in my head. At least that's how it was until I sat down on Sunday evening, watching TV, safe (I presumed) from distraction. My mind had other ideas. It was mulling over the day's activities, tripping past excavation licence numbers, mucky field notebooks and archiving and landing straight on granola. I can't be too sure, but I imagine the thought process went something like this: 

"Granola... Hmmmm, toasty oats... Ooooh, you know, if you added even more apple sauce and squished the wetter mix into the tin to bake, it would make lovely granola bars, just like flapjacks... Oooh, remember flapjacks? You used to love flapjacks. God, it's been years since you made flapjacks. Yum. Didn't you see a recipe for chocolate flapjacks somewhere...?"

Dangerously good chocolate flapjacks

Before I quite knew what I was doing, I was out of the armchair, kneeling on the floor in front of the bookcase and thumbing through the pages of the Green&Black's chocolate cookbook, where I did indeed find a recipe for chocolate flapjacks (with cocoa in them rather than chocolate on them). They looked so delicious in the picture and the recipe seemed like a winner, so here we are. In a week when I had no intention of making anything even resembling a cake, I found myself compelled to rustle up a tray of chocolate flapjacks. 

Happily, flapjack-making is uncomplicated, fast and so alarmingly simple to do, that I couldn't recall why I ever stopped. For such little effort, the rewards are great. The basic recipe is butter, oats, sugar and golden syrup and all that's involved is melt, stir and bake. My only caveat is that you really should use quality ingredients (as in all simple recipes, with so few ingredients, there's nowhere to hide). This is no place for butter substitutes and sub-standard cocoa - the flavour of the finished product would be the worse for it. Similarly, the use of brown and muscovado sugar in the chocolate flapjack recipe (see below) helps to reduce the tooth-aching sweetness of the traditional flapjack and also gives a lovely caramelly note - so don't resort to white sugar, caster or otherwise.

A stack of chocolate flapjacks

My only word of caution in relation to this recipe is that you might want to make a smaller amount - unless you're baking for a school cake sale or feeding a family of ten that is. I'm doing neither of those things and yet somehow didn't think to reduce the recipe to a 'trial bake' size. Unlike the granola recipe, there's no pretending that this one is at all healthy, though you could put a shout out for the nutritious oats (B vitamins!!). Ahem. I will hold my hands up and tell you straight out - the amount of sugar and butter was enough to give me pause. Granted I made the full quantity, making it seem even more decadent. So be prepared and don't let that stop you (just make sure you don't consume the entire lot yourself) because these little chocolatey oat-filled, buttery flapjacks are outstanding. Magnificently, spectacularly good. These are the champions of the tray-bake world. 

I now have a big box full of incredibly delicious, gloriously rich and more-ish chocolate flapjacks. All for me. Just look where being hijacked by cake thoughts gets you. I think I'll be bringing them with me tomorrow when I'm heading back into the office and I'll definitely be serving some up to my sister and hubby when they pop in on Saturday. They do say a problem halved is a problem shared. 

• Granola (original recipe from Nigella's Feast) 
• Feel free to make this as it stands for the first go, as I did, then tweak it to suit your own taste. The amount of apple sauce needn't be exact but I find that any more than 225g makes the mixture too wet. I generally only add about 50-60g of sugar and either the stated amount of syrup or honey, but never both. Two of my sisters cut out all of the sugar/syrup/honey completely and go commando, with just the apple sauce for sweetness. I also use only 1 tbsp of the oil, but with the aid of the apple sauce for moisture and the sugar for browning, you could probably get away without any oil at all. As stated before, I leave out the evil raisins, but if you love them - go for it. You can happily mix it up with the different nuts, seeds and dried fruit, or even by substituting some millet or quinoa flakes for some of the oats. It's your granola. You get to decide. 
• 
  
• Ingredients 
• 450 g rolled oats
• 120 g sunflower seeds
• 120 g white sesame seeds
• 175 g apple sauce (or apple compote)
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 120 g brown rice syrup (or rice malt syrup, or failing that golden syrup)
• 4 tablespoons clover honey (or other runny honey)
• 100 g soft light brown sugar
• 250 g whole natural almonds
• 1 teaspoon maldon salt
• 2 tablespoons sunflower oil
• 300 g raisins

Method 

1. Mix everything except the raisins together very well in a large mixing bowl. I use a couple of curved, rigid spatulas; normally, I'd be happy to use my hands, but here it just leaves you covered with everything.
2. Spread this mixture out on two baking tins (the sort that come with ovens, and are about the width of a rack) or large roasting tins (you need a bit of depth to the tray so you can shovel it around without it going everywhere, so don't use a baking sheet). Bake at 170°C/300-325ºF, turning over about halfway through baking and re-distributing the granola evenly during the baking process. The object is to get it evenly golden without toasting too much in any one place. This should take anything from about 40 minutes. 
3. Once it's baked, allow to cool and mix together with the raisins. Store airtight.

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Chocolate Flapjacks (Based on the recipe in Green&Black's Chocolate Recipes)

Ingredients 

• 275 g rolled oats
• 175 g jumbo oat flakes
• 350 g butter
• 175 g soft brown sugar (I reduced this to 150g)
• 175 g light muscovado sugar (i reduced this to 150g)
• 3 tbsp golden syrup
• 6 tbsp good quality cocoa & 1/4 tsp instant espresso powder
• 2 tbsp desiccated coconut

Method 

1. Preheat the oven to 140°C and line a 17cm x 28cm (or similar sized) baking tray with baking parchment/paper.
2. Melt the butter, syrup and sugars over a very low heat, making sure that you don't let it bubble - you only want them to melt.
3. Mix in the oats, cocoa, espresso and coconut.
4. Tip the mixture into the prepared tin and level it out and press down with your spatula or a fork.
5. Bake for about 30 mins - you want them to be cooked (unfortunately, the usual test of 'cook til they turn golden' doesn't work with the cocoa making them look brown) but not to bubble. Check after 25 mins - a little bubbling around the edges is ok, but if you have bubbling all over, then the mixture will set into a toffee-like consistency and be impossible to eat. 
6. Once baked, allow to cool in the tin to set completely. The mixture will still be very soft and might seem uncooked, but be patient. It will set if you let it sit there! You can score it with a knife while it's still soft, as this will make it easier to cut into squares when it's set. Stored in an airtight container, the flapjacks should keep for a week.