Malteaser cake recipe - help a Catholic out

[Lunawuna]

Help on an Ecumenical matter please So I've been dipping into the world of traybakes - I can make a pretty respectable caramel square (nice, thick, chewy caramel!) and Mars bar crispy square, but I need a good recipe for Malteaser cake.

I tried the BBC Good Food recipe the other day and it didn't have that lovely feeling of your pupils dilating with the sweetness of it all like a good traybake normally has. Am I doomed to never get it right because of my lack of Prod blood? Help! How can getting the right ratio of digestive biscuits, butter, syrup and chocolate be so hard?!

I'm normally a good baker! Honest!

Wbeezer your mum was a canny Scot.
I’m not 100% sure but I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who came over from Scotland many years ago who settled on the NE coast didn’t bring their own tasty recipes with them.

Adds a whole new meaning cooking on a girdle!
Hot stuff.

That's the one! Is it still there?

Highland toffees have gone? 2020 just keeps getting worse.

I think they've gone. I haven't seen them for years and my sister told me that she had googled and they had stopped making them, so I'm blaming her if I'm wrong!

For goodness sake. I used to get them at the shop after school, and they'd do me the bus journey home.

Yes, it’s still there and still popular.

Thornton’s are nice but my teeth gave up on eating toffee many years ago.
I loved the dainty toffee 1 for half a p, or 3 for a penny.
Yes, I’m that old.
You can’t beat a lovely piece of shortbread.

I will blow my cover - my auntie breastfed four babies in Carrick in the sixties! I think that was rare. It was a lovely town back then. Our former rector moved back north when he retired, to an apartment beside the harbour.

I love the mandarin and cream thing even more with grated chocolate on it.

I made snowballs when lockdown started and I started twitching with dessicated coconut withdrawal. DH laughed at me when I told him the coconut snowballs would be next to go after toilet roll. I was right, the horror... They weren't bad, better the next day I think.

Took me ages to find a recipe though, I ended up finding this YouTube channel from The Orkney News www.youtube.com/channel/UCgUxn0e8npqcGCkrU4wiIBg

I've got a list of things from Helen to work through now. Honeycomb next I think and then mash it up with ice-cream since I'm missing ice cream with proper chunks of honeycomb in it.

The Cosy Chair near Jordanstown, since closed down

Aw really? That place did fantastic traybakes and had fancy crockery and everything.

I probably shouldn't keep traybakes in the fridge but I like my Malteser squares nice and hard and not all soft and squidgy.

My version of snowballs is a marshmallow covered in a Fifteen mix (sans cherries). I do make these - but it takes experience to get the mixture the right consistency and I think I always add more digestives than the recipe calls for.

eggandonion I wonder was your aunt the original LLL Carrick founder then, it always struck me as a pretty random place to have the only group in NI groups like that tend to be south Belfast or bust

Yes, PierreBezukov. Just before Christmas. I don’t know why as it was always packed out.
Is the snowball you make a big marshmallow covered in the 15 mix, covered in chocolate, then rolled in coconut?
Fear not, my DH has a thing for keeping stuff in the fridge that wouldn’t normally go there. He hates anything chocolatey being all gooey. Likes his apple pie/crumble cold not hot and has ice cream with rice pudding, also cooled before eating.

sorry Pierre, didn’t read your other comments about the snowballs.
They are the ones I mean.

A lovely woman from LLL Carrick helped me with DS1. It is a small world here

It is a small world here I know! DH and I were watching a film the other day where someone had gone on the run in America, you know the sort of thing. We were laughing that if you tried to go on the run in N Ireland you'd go and get youself a new identity and move to Plumbridge or somewhere and someone would come along and stand beside you in the Spar and say 'I heard you're going by Isabelle now? Well you'll always be Jane to me, sure I knew you when you were a wee girl, how's your mummy keeping?'

I don't think my aunt was into breastfeeding education, she worked in the chip shop at the far side of Carrick from Belfast, towards Kilroot. She was a fryer, which was top job, not the one you give the order to.
My mother was horrified, it wasn't a dignified place to work! But we did go in for the odd bag of chips.

Aw the Cosy Chair is shut? I only went once last summer, it was lovely, and packed.

There were 3 chaplaincy cafes along Elmwood Avenue by Queens. The CoI one did AMAZING scones (she used to chop up taz bars and things in them), I practically lived there the first 2 years of uni.

isabellerossignol it's true

@isabellerossignol very true I've been married 17 years and am still known in the area as my maiden name.

very true I've been married 17 years and am still known in the area as my maiden name.

Many a conversation goes like this. 'Jane Smith. What do you mean you don't know her? She was Fisher to her own name. Now, not the Fishers from Belfast Road who had the car dealership. The other Fishers, from Antrim Road, remember her father was the principal of the school, but he died awful young, it was terrible.'

"you do know her, she went to school with your aunt Sally's neighbour's daughter. No, not the one that had trouble with her spleen, the one that ran away with the milkman. You DO know her, sure you met her at uncle Bob's funereal when you were five. Lovely woman."

Right ok mum, and what about her anyway?

" Dead"

My MIL used to tell stories like that. They'd get more and more involved and there'd be a cast of at least twenty and neither DH or me would know any of them but 9 times out of 10 they'd end up in someone being dead!

Loved that. My mum comes out with similar.

This may have been linked already. Don't know what you experts make of it. traybakesandmore.com/2016/02/

Love this thread. My MIL is from NI and is the absolute master of a wee bun. When they moved house a few years back she took over the church baking within about 3 weeks of turning up, those north of England ladies have nothing on her and defer to her on every catering matter now

BeatrixPottersAlterEgo
that so reminds me of my childhood (different country), same stories but the end usually was not 'dead' but 'liegt so schlecht' - literally 'lies quite badly' => dying or about to

That’s a good site Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g. I have been trying for days to get some condensed milk to make the Lemon squares but none available, probably because I’m looking in The Tesco metros rather than the main store.

We were out on our daily walk which took us past a Sainsbury’s but there were about 40 people queuing to get in so I didn’t bother.

I remember reading that in N.I. when we move out from our parents house to a new home, most of us stay within a 10 mile radius.

This is certainly true for me as even though we’ve moved house twice I’m still only 5 miles from any of my immediate family.