Homemade Snickers

I remember being eleven years old, visiting a classmate's house. I don't remember clearly what we did all day (except that they might have tried to force make-up on me - clearly a fool's errand), but I do remember the snow falling outside in big, fluffy handfulls, and the warm light in their kitchen.

But most of all, I remember the drop-dead delicious homemade snickers her mother made for us. I've been craving them ever since, but I couldn't remember how they were made. My life was a desert empty of homegrown, stick-to-your-ribs snickers until I realised that we live in the information age, and everything I need to know, I can learn from Google.

A few minutes of googling later, I had my recipe, and was well on my way to making snickers.




In the grand old tradition of this blog, I'm making these for the first time ever, and so I expected things to go hideously wrong somehow. Maybe I'd end up with the kind of rock-hard cake you break your teeth on - surely beloved of all dentists of the world in need of some extra cash - or maybe it'd be a mushy mess that fell apart the moment I touched it.

Thankfully, the recipe was very simple and straightforward. It's a really good recipe for absolute beginners, IMHO.



Ingredients required for homemade snickers are these;

2 dl golden syrup (ljus sirap, for those of you of the Swedish persuasion)
1 dl sugar
350 grams crunchy peanut butter
8 dl plain cornflakes
Chocolate

The original recipe says 200 grams of chocolate, but it really all depends on how big your baking tin is, and how much you love chocolate. I adore chocolate, and used a pretty big tin, and so ended up using 450 grams.

Take a big pan (you're going to need the room; everything but the chocolate is going in) and pour in your syrup and your sugar, like so:



Stir over a low heat until the sugar dissolves (the syrup goes cloudy, but the sugar stops feeling so "gritty"). Once that's done, take your peanut butter and put the entire jar's worth in - assuming, of course, that you're using a 350 gram-jar - and stir until it melts. Then, mix in your cornflakes - one handful at the time, making sure everything is evenly distributed. You don't want a big clump of almost-dry cornflakes in the middle, and then liquid syrup-peanut butter all around it. It ruins the whole thing.

If you've done it right, it'll look something like this:


... Yes, it looks like someone already ate this once, but persevere - it gets a whole lot better.

Melt your chocolate any way you want. There are no other ingredients going into it, so you don't need to fiddle about with glass bowls and boiling water unless you really, really want to - I melted mine in the microwave. Just make sure it doesn't start boiling, or it'll be grainy and nasty.

We don't want grainy chocolate.


Here is the beautiful result. Once you've poured the melted chocolate on, put your pan in the fridge to cool for a couple of hours. Once it's done, take it out, use your nifty parchment paper to lift it out of the pan, and cut into whatever size pieces you prefer - I'd recommend smaller pieces, because these are surprisingly filling.

... This might be the first time I've baked something that wasn't completely gone 24 hours later; half of it is still in the fridge.


Anyhow - this really is foolish simple. You don't need to boil anything, you don't need to actually bake anything - there are no minutes in the oven to keep track of - and really, the trickiest part is melting the chocolate. And it's dead-easy to make big batches. Even a small batch goes a long way.

I'd recommend these as Christmas gifts to people, but only if you give them away on Christmas - they start to go soft after you take them out of the fridge, and would probably crumble or start sticking together if left for too long.