I’ll be sharing lots of these recipes over the next few weeks, but I thought I’d start with a traditional dish from my home country. A batch of this tablet can keep a writer going for a week or two, or is great for a meeting of writers as an instant energy boost. Be really careful – not only when cooking it, but also when eating it. Cooking, you can burn yourself, eating, you’ll hit a sugar crash.
- 1kg white cane granulated sugar
- 1 tin (appx. 400g) sweetened condensed milk
- 100g unsalted butter
- a small amount fresh milk to damp sugar (see instructions)
- two teaspoons vanilla essence
- Grease a heat-proof tin or line an old tin with tinfoil. Place aside but within reach of your hob. The closer it is, the less distance you have to carry boiling sugar.
- Take the vanilla essence and stir it into the milk.
- Pour the sugar into the pan and damp it with the milk. By this, I mean add the sugar to the pan, then give it a stir. It stops the milk from burning and sticking to the pan.
- Add the butter and condensed milk.
- Heat on high until boiling – you’ll see it swelling (BE CAREFUL!). It will slowly start changing colour at this point, but don’t let it stick or burn. Simmer for 15-25 minutes. It’s easier to judge when it it’s a mid caramel colour before removing it for the heat and letting it cool a little bit.
- Stir it till it starts to stiffen a little and it feels gritty.
- Pour into a tin.
- Allow to cool and set overnight. You will get patterning on top, it’s just the sugar crystallizing
- Once set, break into pieces, and feed to friends.
- Best served with hot tea, strong coffee, mead or Whiskey!
As you can see, mine was really not dark enough, so I’d go darker than this. Ideally you’d like it to be a shade lighter than fudge, but darker than this. Mine settled into layers which was nice, but not ideal.
D Kai Wilson- Viola is a prolific and often intensely fun writer. Her favorite genres are Sci-Fi, where her Darkness series is set, Fantasy, where she writes up actual play from RPGs she never got to run, urban fantasy, mostly inspired by her bad idea bear (aka her partner, Tempus, and mental health advocacy, as she’s got a raft of diagnoses, none of them particularly pleasant, but none that tend to hold her down for long either
When not writing, and still *thinking* about writing often enough to get caught out, Kai can be found training with her beloved at the Ludosport Academy they belong to, hanging out with family and friends gaming, or enjoying exploring parts of the world they’ve got access to at the time.
A nature and animal lover, Kai is a writer because she has to, because she loves it, and because it’s fun. She is the mother of two cats, two adults and lives in the Cotswolds, UK, with her beloved.
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