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!

Tallycally, also a connection between religion and which paper you read, which school you go to, which tea you drink, whether or not you go to garden centres. Actually, I think the garden centres might be more of NI segregation. All RoI Prods go to garden centres, but so do lots of Catholics, there's no way so many of them could thrive on just the tiny percentage of Prods.

I am doing a recon in the morning.
Will report back with my findings 👀 😬

I think the chocolate is sorted by merchandisers, not Dunnes staff. What tea do you drink? We get Punjana sometimes, otherwise Barrys as we live in Barry land. DD2 drinks fruit tea from the Polish shop.
Dh's family who are Catholic hold funeral afters in a garden centre cafe, it's quite nice. I got lost with my kids in an extremely loyalist area, in a free state car on the way there a few years ago. They were very impressed at flags and painted kerbs.
They were also impressed if they saw boys from prep schools wearing shorts, and women going to gospel halls in hats.

Love this!
I tried making 15’s a few years back for the staff room (nurses). Are you Irish? No. Are you Catholic? Yes. Your tray bakes actually nice but I could tell (spoken by lovely NI colleague through full mouth

Well, this thread has been a learning experience for me. My preferred tea bag would be Punjana or Nambarie. I have a few hundred in a secret location and tend to stock up when I see them on offer in Home Bargains £3.50 for 180.

I’m not a big gardener but a garden centre near us does a great Christmas display which we used to take DS to when he was younger.

Moonbaby1 you’ll have plenty of new recipes to impress your colleagues with.

New topic - what way do you cut your carrots? MIL cuts them into circles, so do her daughters. I do batons, but accept that might be because I often use them as houmous scoopers. And if i'm doing something sort of stir fry, I cut them slantwise.
MIL does not approve of my carrot technique.

I used to slice mine into rounds and a bit like the cooking of sprouts, boiled them to death. My Dsis has got me onto chunky batons, leaving them a bit crunchy.

I’ve been bursting to ask this question. What do you call the polo mint shaped bun which is dough that is deep fat fried and rolled in sugar?
I call it a gravy ring but DH and DS are aghast and say ITS A DOUGHNUT!

I agree it's a doughnut.

It's a doughnut for sure. I was Americanised young

I always called them doughrings, as opposed to the solid jam or custard files ones called doughnuts (scotland).

My granda was the tea taster who blended the tea for Namosa/Nambarrie when they were based here. They're over in England for years and years now though so I'm a Punjab's/Suki/SD Bells drinker now.

Definitely gravy ring! I'd murder one right now..

Dough ring in Central Scotland in the 1960s. It was one of many baked goods names we had to re-learn when we moved to England.

I made this recently, with double the sesame seeds: allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/21533/sesame-seed-cake-squares.aspx
It takes just like sesame snaps.

Thank you Flavia, I knew we were right 😬

Ok, it’s time to call a state of emergency.
I’ve been on my recon mission and it’s worse than I anticipated.
At 0630 hours I entered the building and headed for my targets.
Scoured the area and found all had been evacuated.
No condensed milk, marzipan, almond essence, caster sugar or maltesers.

I did manage to get coconut, syrup and ground almonds which I’ll stash in my secret bunker.

Be vigilant and report any findings directly to MNHQ

Gravy rings in O'Haras home bakery, doughnut at the Balmoral show where they had a machine.
I really need to use up random ingredients I buy for one thing that nobody really likes, so we don't have again.

Having been raised RoI CoI I naturally buy Bewley's tea (although I personally only drink Lady Grey or Clearspring green tea and my Asian DH doesn't care which brand of breakfast tea, my Mum would seriously judge me if I didn't serve her Bewley's), read The Irish Times, know which of the 10-15 nearby garden centres are best for which type of plants (even though I don't actually like gardening) and buy Brennans sliced pan or McCambridges soda bread.

BlackAmericanoNoSugar
What garden centres are the best ?

We are mostly Barrys tea because Bewleys is Dublin tea. We have an Irish Times subscription, we'd like the one where you get a proper paper on Saturday but we live too far from the city to get that.
I'm annoyed that the school fete can't happen, and might ask the rector if they could organise a farmers market instead so I can buy sturdy Protestant plants, fresh rhubarb and a cabbage.
I bought a nice looking farmhouse loaf in our local bakery, but I think they used a communist era East German recipe. It is both dry and chewy.

What is it that you want to buy LadyEloise? I quite like Doyles or Kilmacanogue Avoca for bedding plants, Mt Venus or Johnstown for trees, Mr Middleton for fruit and veg (also has a good range of shrubs, but the quality of those can be variable, for instance I bought 5 Vanille Fraise hydrangeas from there and I got 2 or 3 Vanille Fraise and 2 or 3 something very similar). Windyridge is a good allrounder and has a lot of Christmas stuff in the winter.

Also that one down the N11, although it's a bit of a drive. It does have a nice cafe and good garden furniture. Have googled, it's Arboretum Kilquade.

You sound like you love gardening! I have the pink thing, the blue thing, the brambles, the butterfly thing the buttercups...

I'm raging that my usual summer itinerary of fetes, tractor runs and markets have all been cancelled. However a delivery of plants from Ballyrobert gardens has just arrived for the new bed I'm planning, and so far so good. Not the same as buying odd looking pots of daisies from a beady eyed church lady who is smacked out of her head on shortbread and the People's Friend though

The church plants grown locally with local soil around them work best for me. i had no big plans apart from a weekend away, but the small local events are part of the rhythm of the year.

I'm generally busy on a stall at the church/school fete and the plants sell out so quickly that I never get a look in. I send DH to the cake stall before it's all gone, but there's no point in sending him to the plant stall as he has no idea.

I love gardens eggandonion but not gardening. I come from a long line of extremely knowledgeable horticulturalists with amazing gardens so I have been taught a lot of things, whether I wanted to learn the or not. But I don't enjoy the labour of gardening, or even being outside as I don't like direct sunshine and have seriously bad tree-pollen hay fever. I get advice about planting from my Mum, buy the plants and the gardeners plant them for me. Also the ongoing nature of gardening doesn't suit my personality all that well. I like to do something and finish it, like a quilt or a crocheted shawl, I get slightly peeved that I get the garden perfect and then everything changes. When I worked that's the type of job that I had, project based, complete and deliver to client, move onto something else. Which is precisely the thing that my Mum loves about her garden, she loves that fact that it all changes and she makes constant adjustments to her garden.

Thanks BlackAmericanoNoSugar.
I have visited most of them at some time.
Apparently Avoca Kilmac has been open.
I do love coffee and a cake there, though the cake portions are too big.
I'd prefer to get half the cake at three quarters the price.
I see Avoca's chief executive has resigned.
Has anyone visited an Avoca and a Daylesford ?
Are they similar ?