Knickers and shoes

I was away over Valentine’s Day, visiting family in Devon. I stayed in a guesthouse on Torquay seafront with my sister and her gorgeous baby Mimface, aka the apple of my eye. We stayed up late, sometimes as late as 9pm, colouring a page of our adult colouring book that featured some particularly bonkers looking ostriches, and quietly eating Ferroro Rochers, which I had to unwrap in advance before Mimface went to sleep, as my sister said I was “too noisy at unwrapping”. So whilst it was pretty rock n roll, it was not quite what one might expect from a Valentine’s Day weekend. But upon returning home I discovered Ian had baked a batch of caramel choux buns. I once tried to bake choux pastry and it came out flat, like a less delicious melba toast. I expressed what I considered to be the appropriate amount of surprise and delight, which Ian shrugged off. ‘Nah, it was easy,’ he said, nonchalantly drizzling homemade caramel over the perfect choux buns on the table.

That was my first inkling that I had accidentally married a master baker. The next clue was a couple of weekends ago when he casually announced he was going to make billionaire bars, aka snickerbites (aka, v informal, knicknix). As he melted and mixed various calorific deliciousnesses together I pottered around cleaning and making beds up for impending visitors. When I returned to check on his progress, he said, ‘I thought you might like to blog about it, so I have documented every step for you.’

Yeah, he’s pretty wonderful. Though this morning he did get unnecessarily grumpy at me for opening the front door before he was ready to leave and then claimed he was just worried Boom Boom might have “jumped the gate to freedom” – seeing as she is about 4 inches tall and the gate comes up to my midriff he might as well worry about her sprouting wings and flying away, but whatever. Swings and roundabouts.

Ingredients:

500g chocolate
225g peanut butter (split into 150g and 75g)
60g butter
200g caster sugar
100g evaporated milk
100g marshmallows
200g roasted almonds, crushed
600g toffee
150ml double cream

Method:

Melt 250g chocolate and 75g peanut butter together, then pour into a silicon cake tin. Put in the fridge or freezer to cool and harden. Melt butter, sugar and evaporated milk together, then stir in the marshmallows until combined then half the almonds:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pour on top of the hardened chocolate, throw over the rest of the chopped almonds and put the cake tin back in the fridge or freezer. Then melt the toffee and double cream together:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pour the melted toffee over the crushed almond layer. Back in the fridge or freezer it goes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Melt the remaining peanut butter and chocolate together, and pour over the melted toffee:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It goes back in the freezer overnight, then you chop it, eat it, share it with Pete, nyemnyemnyem