Mother Hubbard's caramel slice

Partly due to the exigencies of daily life (such as shortage of time to go shopping and shortage of money to go shopping with), partly due to the chaotic state of the pantry and partly due to the fact that we have just got a new fridge and don't want to fill it straight up with all the old (and I mean old; there's a bag of potatoes which recently celebrated their first birthday, a container of frozen peanut sauce from 2008 and a jar of senapsill in there dated best-before 2007...) crap stuff from our previous fridge, we have been having a Mother Hubbard month, which is where you try to use up things from your cupboard (and fridge and freezer) rather than buying new food.  It's amazing what you can make without having to go shopping at all!  Or perhaps it's just amazing how much random food I seem to accumulate in the pantry.  During the Manchester riots last year, I made some last-minute 'zombie survival' plans and calculated that we had over a month's worth of food on hand without even trying.

This is fine for regular meals on my own, when baked beans served over pasta, or miso soup noodles with cabbage and an egg three nights in a row, are perfectly reasonable food choices; I've also revisited, with more than a touch of nostalgia, the old standby of my student days -- HP sauce and mayonnaise on crackers.  These ingredients aren't only for trashy-food combos, either: Shrove Tuesday dinner was pancakes (made without milk, a recipe worth recording as we never seem to have any milk) served Japanese-style as a main course, wrapped with cabbage and egg and drizzled with (yup) HP sauce and mayonnaise; then with lemon and sugar, or strawberry jam and chocolate, for dessert.

But it doesn't really seem fair to inflict my HPSM fetish on others, when making food to share -- so what can one make, when the cupboard is bare?  Answer: caramel slice.

This is sometimes called "millionaire's shortbread"; I've no idea why, as the ingredients are dead cheap!  Unless perhaps you manage to save so much money on food during Mother-Hubbard months that you end up extremely rich.  I'm still hoping...

Caramel Slice

Base:
100g butter
2/3 cup SR flour
1/3 cup plain flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup coconut

Caramel:
1 can (397g) condensed milk
2 heaped tbs golden syrup
30g butter

Topping:
150g dark chocolate

Preheat oven to 180C.  Melt butter; sift in flours and sugar and add coconut.  Mix all together until well blended.  Press mixture into a lined tray (I used one about 18 x 25cm) and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden brown.  Set aside to cool for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile make caramel: add all ingredients to a small saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking, until caramel is a nice light brown colour and seems a bit thicker.

Pour caramel over base and return to oven; cook for about 15 minutes until caramel is a deeper brown on top and is just set.  Cool for a couple of hours.

Melt chocolate and spread over top of caramel; make swirly patterns with a knife if you want to be artistic!  Cut into squares or slices when cool.

Makes about 30 pieces (2 inches square).

(Based on recipes from Butter Sugar Flour and taste.com.au)

Pancakes for people who never have any milk

Google was my friend and helped me to find this handy link; I halved the recipe, reduced the amount of baking powder and added a splash more water because I wanted pancake-thickness rather than pikelet-thickness, cooked some of them and then added another splash of water to make crepe-thickness ones for dessert.

1 cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 tbs sugar
1 cup water
1 tbs oil
1 egg

Sift dry ingredients into a bowl; make a well in the middle.  Whisk together wet ingredients, pour into well,  mix in dry ingredients gradually with whisk.  Adjust to desired consistency (double pouring cream for pancakes, single pouring cream for crepes); leave to stand 10 min.

Meanwhile (if you have an electric stove like me) turn stove to medium so that it has reached a nice consistent temperature by the time you're ready to cook.  For each pancake, add a little dab of butter to the pan, melt and swirl round pan, then add a serving-spoonful of batter (amount depends on desired thickness and heat of pan), tilt pan to spread, and cook until lightly browned on each side.

Made 6 pancakes and 4 crepes, 18cm diameter.