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!

I'd love a Sainsburys or an Asda down south. Just for a change.
When I go to Newry / Sprucefield I'm into Sainsburys pronto.

When Sainsburys opened their first shop in N Ireland it was in Ballymena. It was quite a big deal at the time, mid nineties and the country was changing and all that. They interviewed the store manager on UTV live or similar, they had brought him over from England. He said it was all going well but within a few days they had realised that the local shopping habits didn't match the English shoppers habits and they had grossly underestimated the demand for home baking ingredients. It always stuck with me. Because growing up I didn't know anyone whose mum didn't bake, and by the time we were teenagers all my friends and I were perfectly capable of producing cakes and scones without a hint of baking anxiety.

What choice of supermarkets do you have down south LadyEloise? Only been in Dublin on short breaks so didn’t really pay much attention to supermarkets.
I find Sainsbury’s more expensive than Tesco’s, which is where I do my main shop.
Asda isn’t really handy to me but on the odd occasion I’m in it it seems on a par with Tesco price wise.

We have in order of market share

Dunnes Stores - Irish owned,
SuperValu-Irish owned and Tesco-British owned
Aldi
Lidl.
Smaller shops would be Centra and Mace.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Are these the rest of the lyrics?

Jesus loves me this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but He is strong
Yes Jesus loves me
Yes Jesus loves me
Yes Jesus loves me
The Bible tells me so

Lurking English Catholic... wrong side of the tracks on both counts but loving this!

You’re right there Isabelle. When they opened their store at Holywood exchange DH was all ‘Oh, you want to see all the fancy stuff they have’.

I was able to turn out scones, German biscuits and apple tart from about 11 year old. Our mum over the years didn’t have great MH and every Sunday I would make the dinner, mince and onion pie, chips and salad but she did teach me all I knew.

When we started cookery lessons in secondary school our first lesson was tea and toast. I was like whaa?

Catholic here too. I struggle with all traybakes can eat ALL of them though. Proud moment recently, in lockdown I was added to not one but two Watsapp recipe exchange groups, mostly made up of Protestant women Still wont be able to bake or cook like them unfortunately

I think so, @HelenaJustina!

This thread has been a revelation, in many ways. I’m loving making traybakes that don’t need flour or eggs! Mint aero today.

@Tommorrowsanewday this is probably VERY outing but the first thing we made in HE in form 1 was Chicken Waldorf Salad!

Chicken Waldorf salad, fancy. You must have attended a more upmarket school than me. Although that wouldn’t have been hard .
The laugh about it was there was only margarine, the real echo stuff (most probably haven’t heard of echo margarine) available for butter and the milk for the tea was made with powder. I mean who would use this at home?
Our teacher used to drive me nuts as she pronounced it margarine as in Margaret.

My mum always said margarine with a hard g - I wonder if she still does. It was always Kraft in our house though - the big square tubs (which could then be utilised once empty and cleaned to store said traybakes)

Our HE teacher used to pronounce oven “uvin” which we thought was hilarious.

@Tommorrowsanewday Echo was a staple in DMs house - she would buy 3-4 blocks a week! More if there was a funeral to bake for!

When I moved away DM would pick me up from Aldergrove ( still Aldergrove To me not the international ) and the rule was she needed the deaths done by the M1.

The famous echo margarine.

I'm not sure if it counts as a traybake (doesn't have as much chocolate and condensed milk as most of the examples here) but does anyone have a tried and tested flapjack recipe? Have been asked to make one instead of birthday cake but I have never made one before and want to make sure it come out right first time!

Think I might pour melted chocolate over the top so it can have decorations - flapjack with a layer of chocolate on top (not just drizzles) can be a thing right?

My home economics teacher - a prod in a catholic school - despaired at my liberal use of butter in the 80's - but she always loved the food I cooked and had a natural inclination towards awarding me with the highest grades, I loved her classes.
The religious side of things leaves me absolutely cold (not the politics)...even now I am triggered by it on this thread and I really should have moved on...but I've never really figured how to do that...I don't live in NI anymore but I feel I am so easily transported back there in my head, it annoys me.

@Eve, I still call it Aldergrove too. I was thinking of the carpet on the exit walkway which says ‘Welcome to N.I. Home of Bushmills whiskey’ etc and I think they need to add ‘Home of the Traybakes and Mammies’ . Don’t get us started on funeral wakes!

I remember making apple strudel in home ec, it seemed wildly exotic to me

JasperRising lots of people swear by Soupdragon's from here but I have to admit I'm not a fan. Too sweet even for flapjacks for me. I like Lorraine Pascal's ones from the BBC site.

@Sultanarama I think the liberal use of butter here crosses the divide. I don’t know if this was just in our house but I didn’t eat a whole floret of cauliflower until I went for dinner at my MILs.

My mum would boil the cauliflower or turnip until soft, drain and mash it with a tonne of butter and salt and pepper.
Butter always makes things tastier.

@JasperRising 100% you can have chocolate on a flapjack. I have an old Waitrose recipe which I only make at Christmas which is cranberry flapjack with white chocolate drizzled over

My mil makes the nastiest rice pudding I have ever had. And she puts the sprouts on to boil for Christmas at the twelfth.

@Tommorrowsanewday - my mum used to use that Echo margarine to make our sandwiches for school - it was horrible. And we knew that mum was at home, using plenty of Lurpak on her lunchtime sandwich!

I'd swap Sainsbury's for Aldi. I can't believe they have Aldi down south, but not here. Aldi has so much non food related tat for sale, and I lust after it.

Did anyone else have a mum/granny who had a thing about electric knives, or was it just mine? Mine had one for the Sunday roast and it was a hallowed item. I was given one as a wedding present and it was one of the defining "I'm an adult now" moments of my life.

And she puts the sprouts on to boil for Christmas on the 12th .
That is a running joke here.

Straight after dinner we would always finish with something sweet, jam tarts, buttered Madeira cake, iced diamonds. Mum would say, ‘If you don’t finish your dinner there’ll be no sweet’.
Don’t know if this was the same with you?

Nooo Beatrice I love Sainsbury's. Everyone who works in the Holywood exchange one is just so nice and friendly. Unlike Tesco's where they run you over with a click and collect trolley as soon as look at you after first making the aisles a obstacle course to slow you down.

Also, get you showing off with your electric knife There was much sorrow for my mum when her electric carving knife/ hand mixer finally gave up the ghost and she couldn't get a replacement.