Emergency cornflake cake

 

I’ve long been an advocate of proper baking, but staff house living taught me that ‘whipping up a Victoria sponge’ is  not always as easy as our famous domestic goddesses want us to believe. No, a Victoria sponge is not particularly complex, but in a kitchen free of mixing bowls, weighing scales and a fully functioning oven, even this simple staple proved too much of a challenge. So I was faced with a dilemma (admittedly a very small one as dilemmas go), a friend of mine at the staff house wanted to make a cake as a gift for her boyfriend’s parents who’d come to visit… but we only had a couple of hours and that kitchen. We also quickly realised that ingredients were also an issue, pot noodles are more readily available than flour and baking powder in our house and, living in the Cornish countryside, the buses wouldn’t be running regularly enough to get us to the shops and back. Optimism still holding on in there, we trundled up the road to a nearby campsite, in the hope that their little shop would provide some inspiration. Unsurprisingly, baking essentials weren’t in abundance here either, but we came away with butter, Mars bars, Corn Flakes, Smarties and, most importantly, a plan.

I had vague memories of crispie cakes and marshmallow squares and decided that something could be salvaged from this ‘ready steady cook’ style bag of delights. The result was not particularly high brow on the baking scale, but it tasted pretty moorish and that was pleasantly surprising enough for us!

Ingredients:

4 large mars bars, chopped

250g pack butter, chopped into chunks

About half a large box of cornflakes

2 tubes of smarties

 

Method:

·         Melt the butter and chocolate in a pan over a very low heat (ideally do this in a bowl over a pan of simmering water – we didn’t have such a luxury and it did still work, you just have to be careful not to let the chocolate burn)

·         Once melted, add the cornflakes a few handfuls at a time – you want all the flakes to be well coated, without too much chocolate liquid left over at the bottom.

·         Spoon the mixture into any lined container, scatter over the smarties and cool in the fridge until set (about an hour should do it).

·         Cut into large pieces once cooled (it should be firm but slightly gooey in the middle, so don’t cut the pieces too small or else they’ll fall apart).