You could bribe the Pope with this chocolate caramel slice.
Rich, gooey, satisfying. Completely balanced between the shortbread biscuit base (dessicated coconut👩🍳 😘!), caramel, and dark chocolate. I’ve seen some skinny caramel slices, and they look forlorn and wanting, but that’s not the case here. There’s exactly the right amount of caramel to chocolate and base. It’s sweet, yes, but you can slice it further to nibble-size, or leave it as a sweetener, i.e. Pope-bribe-size.
There is no improvement on Donna Hay’s classic recipe. Absolutely no notes. Snaps for Donna. Of course hers are much neater than mine, but eh, what’s a little untidiness between friends?
In our house, whenever these get made, they get distributed outside the house too, so the biggest problem is there’s never enough. HINT: MAKE DOUBLE THE RECIPE.
Um, Mary Queen of Scots?
Wikipedia has a little bit on the history of this slice, which irritatingly mentions Mary Queen of Scots, but doesn’t say what she was doing with it in the 1500s. Ahhh, apparently, back then only the shortbread part existed. Mary loved shortbread made in petticoat tail shapes, like the petticoats she wore (pie slices with fluted edges), which is a bit raunchy of Mary, given she was very religious. (The Pope would not have approved.)
I don’t know about Mary’s petticoats, but I think certainly her neck ruff is a bit like pie slices with flutes. The plot then thickens, because she was a bit of rebel with that piece of clothing, wearing the ruff open with a v-neck, instead of round and closed, like all the other Elizabethans, accentuating that pie shape. Even her effigy in Westminster Abbey has an open ruff.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with Donna Hay’s great chocolate caramel slice recipe (see link above). Though I wonder if, like me, you’ll think of Mary Queen of Scots when you bite into the shortbread?! 😂
“What I’ve got to get you to do to go to the kitchen is look at the picture, your mouth starts to water. Then you go to the recipe and you realize that you possibly have some of those ingredients already in the kitchen, or you know where to buy the remaining ones. You look at the method: It’s quite short, it’s really well-written and it’s really simple. That was my hook.”
-donna Hay, Quoted at splendidtable.org
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