Joosemaus.co.uk

Tags: Food

Now that the internet is readily established it's very easy to share knowledge, and with the recent invention of digital cameras you can show people exact what you are getting up to. My work email inbox was blessed with a link to the website "Pimp that Snack". This website can be reached by clicking here. After browsing through the many projects that these guys had undertaken, I thought it would only be proper to give one of the recipes a quick go. Luckily I was going on holiday soon, so this would give the perfect opportunity to flex my creative muscles

Our tale begins with a journey to Aberystwyth's Lidl's store to find our ingredients. The challenge was to find similar materials amongst the myriad of foreign product found there. Luckily Lidl is very cheap and high in quality so I was certain that the project would turn out to be a success

Our pantry filled with choice ingredients we endeavoured to give ourself luck by brewing a special potion of cooking enhancement. This was made from equal proportions of Lidl's "Energy Drink" and Somerfield's very own Club Royal pale cream sherry. All medicine that is good for you is supposed to taste awful, and this was no different. The very prospect of it made the hardware in my digital camera have momentary jitters. The crew all assembled, we toasted our success in the foul brew and set to work!

The first instruction on the Pimp my snack website for the construction of the lion bar was to "tediously seperate the werther's originals from their wrappers". Our first stumbling block had been in the supermarket. As we were unable to find Werther's originals we had to settle for Lidl's "Butter Candy". Unwrapping them was tedious, but we decided to go the extra mile and increase the tediom. Adding oven gloves to the mix did significanly increase the time taken to unwrap each sweet, but after about 4 or 5 successful goes we thought we could do much better. The ladel, spoon and oven glove techniques was rated the best - it took about 5 minutes to unwrap each Butter candy!

By the end of the procedure we all thoroughly hated the Candy fiends, so we were all too glad to throw them into the saucepan and give them a good heating. Serve them right we say! During the melting process they took a great deal of stirring, and I was slightly worried that they would burn, but all turned out well. We were left with a saucepan full of very thick sticky caramel and arms like the fat end of table legs.

The caramel was quickly poured into our container ( in this case a plastic sandwich box ) and left to set. The setting process probably took all of 2 minutes, and we were able to fashion long strands of caramel that were about 3 metres long. Careful kids, when it's hot it burns! The next step was to add wafers to the container and begin to make the filling

Consulting the recipe on the pimp that snack website, I saw that the filling was a simple butter icing made with icing sugar, butter, and a jar of peanut butter. It turned out to require around 1kg of butter which basically meant it was Lard cake. For those slimmers out there it'd probably not be wise to eat the bar in one go. The mixture was also significantly runnier than i was expecting. The mixture was layered alternately with the wafers

Ah chocolate! There is no better chocolate than Lidl's. It's cheap and tasty and in my opinion much better than any chocolate you can buy from the larger supermarkets. For this recipe we needed 12 bars. Once the wafers were installed some chocolate was melted and used to seal the bottom.

The whole bar was then put in the freezer and we went off for the rest of the day and evening to make merry. The next day the bar was removed from the fridge, more chocolate melted and rice crispies ( or lidl's choco rice ) mixed in. This lumpy concoction was then poured over our bar and left to set. The final pictures show the cutting of the bar and comparisons with a normal size snack. I can only assume that the picture on the pimp that snack website was taken when the bar was still frozen, as their filling didn't ooze out. It certainly tasted ok!