My friend was coming to stay for a few days, and trying to play good hostess I asked her what she wanted to have for breakfast - given that we are a weird household when it comes to this supposedly important meal and either skip it entirely or just have cereal bars. So I bought a big box of porridge oats for her, but then was left with a dilemma: what to do with the remainder? Well, I'd been meaning to make the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's honey and peanut butter bars, and now was my chance.
Stuck at home on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I decided to give them a go. Of course any normal person would read the recipe, go to the shop and buy the ingredients etc etc. But not me, in the spirit of experimentation I decided that, even though I didn't have enough of most of the things needed to make these bars, I would press on.
Not enough butter? No problem, instead of 125 grams I just used the 50 grams that I had, thinking I could supplement with peanut butter. But no, not enough peanut butter either, so I just chucked in the pan 140 grams, desperately trying to scrape as much as possible out of the jar. No oranges? Just try and zest an already zested orange to get a teency bit of zest out, supplementing instead with the juice of said orange and the zest of two lemons instead of one. And who weighs honey? Its a pain to even get off the spoon in the first place, let alone getting it off the spoon, onto the scales, off the scales and into the pan (some hindsight googling reveals that one tablespoon, which is what I used, is about 15 grams, so again, way off the 45 grams the recipe calls for). Oh yeah, and the the mixture didn'y quite fit the dish, so I left a gap. What could be the harm.
Well, they didn't quite work. They taste nice (and actually sweet enough, so not sure about the sugar and honey quantities) but the consistency is different to the ones I had tried before, I assume because of the reduced fat content and reduced amount of honey. And of course, in the spirit of totally ignoring the recipe, I cut them too soon so they crumbled a bit more than they should have. But I guess not bad for such a deviation from the original!
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So the moral of the story is, don't stay in on a sunny day and stick to the recipe.
Edit: I am assured that they don't taste like they went wrong, so maybe not such a disaster after all.
Stuck at home on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I decided to give them a go. Of course any normal person would read the recipe, go to the shop and buy the ingredients etc etc. But not me, in the spirit of experimentation I decided that, even though I didn't have enough of most of the things needed to make these bars, I would press on.
Not enough butter? No problem, instead of 125 grams I just used the 50 grams that I had, thinking I could supplement with peanut butter. But no, not enough peanut butter either, so I just chucked in the pan 140 grams, desperately trying to scrape as much as possible out of the jar. No oranges? Just try and zest an already zested orange to get a teency bit of zest out, supplementing instead with the juice of said orange and the zest of two lemons instead of one. And who weighs honey? Its a pain to even get off the spoon in the first place, let alone getting it off the spoon, onto the scales, off the scales and into the pan (some hindsight googling reveals that one tablespoon, which is what I used, is about 15 grams, so again, way off the 45 grams the recipe calls for). Oh yeah, and the the mixture didn'y quite fit the dish, so I left a gap. What could be the harm.
Well, they didn't quite work. They taste nice (and actually sweet enough, so not sure about the sugar and honey quantities) but the consistency is different to the ones I had tried before, I assume because of the reduced fat content and reduced amount of honey. And of course, in the spirit of totally ignoring the recipe, I cut them too soon so they crumbled a bit more than they should have. But I guess not bad for such a deviation from the original!
.JPG)
So the moral of the story is, don't stay in on a sunny day and stick to the recipe.
Edit: I am assured that they don't taste like they went wrong, so maybe not such a disaster after all.
Ha ha, sounds just like me when I can't be bothered to actually get the ingredients. Also measuring out treacle even more problematic than honey! Flapjacks are probably the most forgiving of such misdemeanours - bet they were tasty :-)
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