Just because you’re lazy, have no proper oven, or are culinarily challenged, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to have something nice in your lunch box or to impress your new hottie lab partner. No bake slices tick all the boxes for the nascent student baker – there’s some melting of stuff, some smooshing of stuff, and a whole bunch of smashing of stuff. If you don’t have a food processor or blender to destroy your biscuits, then put them in a clean plastic shopping bag, put that in another plastic bag, take the air out of them, then wrap it all up in a tea towel or similar and beat the crap out of it with a rolling pin or hammer. If you don’t have a fridge, well, good luck to you.
One of the dangers of opening a can of sweetened condensed milk is that it tastes incredibly nice and will likely get eaten (ie, licked off of grubby fingers) if it’s not all used up. The preferred solutions in the Longbean house are to either double the recipe and die a happy, albeit diabetes-tinged death, or make two different things, feel productive, and make visitors feel domestically inferior. Otherwise, you can mix the leftovers with an equal part of vinegar and a little mustard for a sweet coleslaw dressing. An awful looking American cooking website tells me that it is a key ingredient in something called a ‘chocolate glazed cookie pizza’ but I am not quite ready to switch sides on the war on obesity just yet.
Lollie cake
This is the root cause of many children’s birthday party sugar comas, and seems to be a rare example of kiwi ‘cuisine’ that hasn’t been pinched from somewhere else or argued over for decades. I can say with relative certainty that Sir Ernest Rutherford, Kate Sheppard, and Sir Edmund Hillary were fuelled to succeed by the heady combination of crushed malt biscuits and sickly sweet milk. If you haven’t made your own before, give it a try, even if it is just so you can see that bought lollie cake really is crap.
Fruit puffs disappeared for a while, but Pams now does them and you can buy them in bulk from Bin Inn. For those of a more adventurous bent, try using plain chocolate or spiced biscuits, or experiment with different lollies, as long as they are fairly soft – may I recommend RJ’s soft red licorice.
- 120g butter (approx half a cup)
- ½ can (200g) sweetened condensed milk
- A squirt of golden syrup (optional)
- One packet (180g) of fruit puffs or Eskimos
- One packet (250g) of malt biscuits smashed as small as you can manage
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon (also optional)
- Dessicated coconut (to roll)
- Waxed paper (helpful)
Cut up the lollies into small bits, and smash up the biscuits until they are totally crushed.
Put the sweetened condensed milk, the butter and the syrup in a pan (for the stovetop) or in a large glass bowl (if you’re using a microwave). Slowly melt them together, stirring regularly, until they are completely combined – don’t boil! Remove from the heat, then add the biscuits, lollies and cinnamon and stir until it’s a big mess.
Here you have options. If you want to make kiwi grandmothers across the nation proud, take a long sheet of wax paper, sprinkle some coconut on it, and form / roll the cake mess into a log on the paper (good time to use latex gloves, see?). Sprinkle it with more coconut, pat it down a bit, wrap it up and refrigerate til firm and slice. To get a bit flash on it, you could roll it into truffle-like balls, or form it into little minicakes.
Mix and match refrigerator slice, or, truffles for dummies
(for those who like to pretend that lollie cake is passé)
This is essentially the same recipe, but without the lollies, and easier to modify – it’s like a choose your own adventure, but with cake. Try: chocolate and Milo, or rum and raisin, or apricot and orange, or lemon and white chocolate.
Basic mix:
- 1 packet (250ish grams) of plain biscuits, smashed into coarse pieces (super wines, digestives, malt biscuits, plain chocolate biscuits)
- 125g butter
- ½ can sweetened condensed milk
- 1/4c brown sugar (only for those with a serious sweet tooth)
Flavoursome things:
- 1 cup of stuff – chopped up dried fruit, sultanas, chocolate chips, soft nuts (like walnuts), sweets, whatever
- Other extras, depending on your flavours: some orange or lemon zest and a big squeeze of juice, a few tablespoons of liqueur, 2 tablespoons of cocoa power, 1/4c Milo powder, cinnamon, a teaspoon of vanilla, whatever.
As above, melt together the sweetened condensed milk and the butter, add all the other ingredients, and stir. You can make a log or balls, or you can press it into pretty much any sort of dish, as long as it is either lightly greased with butter or lined with baking paper, otherwise you will be chipping it out. If you’re being tidy, use a baking tin and make it nice and even. Stick it in the fridge. Eat it.
If you want to add a topping before you put it in to cool, you can use chopped nuts, or melted chocolate, or desiccated coconut. Keen beans can make their own icing by combining 2 cups of icing sugar, about 100g of very soft or melted butter, a splash of milk, and whatever flavourings you like. Experimentation is good for the soul, if not for the stomach.
A word about butter: these sorts of recipes are great for those of you who like to, er, make your own butter but who don’t do much cooking or baking. You might find that things with stronger flavours – like chocolate, or booze, or chocolate and booze – taste the best. Just remember to make things bite sized or you will, ahem, get too full too quickly, and that’s not fun for anyone, let alone the purple monkey hanging from the ceiling.
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