Flapjack!

So I was making flapjack just now when I got in from work, feeling a mite peckish. Flapjack as a cake recipe is about as simple as it gets:

  • 4 Parts Oats
  • 2 Parts Butter
  • 1 Part Dry Sugar
  • 1 Part Wet Sugar

Melt the butter and sugar slowly in a pan, stir in the oats and bake in a medium oven (say, 165 C) for 20 minutes.

However, as I’m genetically incapable of leaving a recipe the hell alone and am prone to distraction by interesting ingredients in the cupboard, mine were:

  • 35g lightly beaten up branflakes
  • 190g Sainsbury Organic Porridge Oats (rolled, not chopped)
  • 150g Unsalted Farmhouse Butter (from the marvellous Birchfield Family Farm)
  • 75g Palm Sugar (Tricky to get hold of since Sainsbury stopped selling it, but is ridiculously nice – should be a proscribed substance)
  • 75g Rice Malt Syrup (you what!! I hear you cry? It’s like Golden Syrup but much much lighter. try it. no really.)
  • Large dollop of Yorkshire Honey (I like honey. I also like my food to have provenance, so thank you to Robinson Honey of Broadway, York. Food miles? Hah!)
  • 75g glace cherries

Prepare your pan and oven. Mine’s a fan oven, so I heated it to 160C and used a lower middle shelf.

I’m lazy so lined my pan with greaseproof paper. You might be lucky enough to have a cake tin with a removable base, or you might like scraping burnt bits off the bottoms of pans, it’s all good.

Melt the Sugar, Syrup and Butter in a pan on the hob as slowly as you have patience for. You don’t want it to come close to boiling or burning. Stir now, stir often. I used a pair of cooking chopsticks to stir with because I’m odd like that.

Put the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. When the Sugar mix is completely melted and dissolved, pour it over the dry ingredients and stir it all together. The consistency should not be too wet, you’re aiming for the oats to be generously coated, not swimming.

Pour it into your cake tin and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the edges are about to burn. If you like your flapjack crunchy, cook it 20 degrees hotter, or 5 minutes longer.

Don’t be surprised if the mixture bubbles up a bit in the oven, it will settle back down when it’s cooling, but it’s safest to allow space for that, otherwise you get a burnt oven.

Enjoy!