Given my plethra of worrying mistakes in the kitchen, you could be forgiven for feeling more than a little apprehensive at the sight of a food recipe appearing on my blog this week. To help ease those fears of salmonella, food poisoning, and general death-by-Bella's-cooking, I'd like to reassure you that the main ingredient was biscuits (though I did use an egg, so watch out family!)
For some reason, lockdown has given millions of us the urge to cook, and I'm clearly not an exception. Now school's over and my A-Levels are in the hands of BoJo (not a reassuring thought), I figured I might as well get in some practice for university and learn to cook more than just spaghetti bolognese.
I'm guessing making peanut butter, chocolate covered buiscuit cake won't be a weekly nutritional requirement next year, but given the fact my family actually liked a recipe I made up myself, and that the main ingredient is a 50p packet of rich tea digestives, I thought I'd blog about it. There's also the fact that I needed to find something to post about this week, and I've been too busy writing an article for a magazine to focus on it (yes, somebody gave me a by-line, I'm just as shocked as you. I'll blog about that next week as yet another way to avoid thinking about content.)
So without further ado, I give you...Reece's Squares (or, since I'm pretty sure that's copy-righted, Peanut Butter, Hazelnut Chocolate, Rich Tea Biscuit cake. But that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?) Perfect for all the familyexcept me becase ironically I've got a nut allergy so had to rely on my sister taste testing them, these babies took me 15 minutes to throw in a bowl, and 20 minutes to bake. I'd like to emphasise the 'throw in a bowl' comment, because I literally just chucked everything into a mixing bowl and hoped for the best.
Anyway, on to being a food blogger...
Method
*Pre-heat the fan oven to 180 degrees Celcius*
1) Take the rich tea biscuits (or digestives, or maryland cookies or whatevs you have) and put them in a zip-lock bag. Using a rolling pin, hit them until they're crushed to small crumbs. You can also roll over the bag or sit on it to really crush them into little pieces.
2) Empty the crushed up biscuits into a mixing bowl. Melt the milk chocolate in the microwave in short, 20 second blasts, stirring in between so you don't burn it.
3) When the chocolate is completely melted, add it to the mixing bowl, along with half a bottle of golden syrup. Mix the ingredients together until they are well combined. If you want, you can add more chocolate but I stuck with a small amount given how much Nutella I slathered on top of the final thing.
4) In a separate mixing bowl, add the sugar, flour, and butter, and cream them together until you reach a soft paste consistency. At this point, beat in the egg until the mixture is a runny cake batter.
5) Take 4 tablespoons of peanut butter and mix this thoroughly into the cake batter. Add the biscuit mixture to the cake mixture and stir until well combined.
6) Empty the final product into a tray roughly 2-3 inches thick lined with baking paper, and spread it out to an even layer. Pop in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean when pushed into the middle.
7) When cooked, take the tray out of the oven and lift the biscuit-cake out using the baking tray. Leave to cool.
8) When cool, take the Nutella and remaining two tablespoons of peanut butter and cream them together. The final result should be mainly Nutella with small speckles of peanut butter.
9) Empty the mixture on top of the fully cooked cake and spread it out so that it covers the top of the cake. If you like, you could cover the sides in chocolate too, but hearing feedback from the people who actually could consume my creation, that would probably be a bit sickly!
10) Finally, pop the finished creation into the fridge and leave the chocolate to set for a few hours. When set, slice into squares and enjoy!
Because I'm hardly your next Jack Monroe, I didn't take photos of the steps as I went through. That was partly because I didn't realise I would be blogging about it, but mainly because I didn't think the finished thing would be edible let alone actually taste amazing! So I'm really sorry if that makes things difficult for people replicating it (seriously, if you do, that would be insanely cool!)
I'll leave you with a few more photos of the finished product, and the promise of more sciency content next week!
