The Perfect Flapjack?

Inspired by Patch’s post where she talks of the problem of flapjacks coming out crumbly or too hard and chewy and remembering that my flapjacks of the past had often been on the hard side, I decided to try and make the perfect flapjack.

Now in my youth, when I was in my convent grammar school, I had ended up studying ‘O’ level Cookery because I wasn’t very good at French and we had had to buy a standard cookery book which contained a recipe for flapjacks which was the one I used.

Here you can see that it has suffered rather from being much used over the intervening years.

And here is the recipe.

I always felt that part of the problem with the flapjacks being so hard was that they were cooked for an hour at a low temperature, so I decided to look and see if I had any other recipes that were different in any way.

Another cookery book that I have had for a long time was given to me by a school friend (with an eye to when I was married, I think!) and I use it for certain recipes but not flapjacks.

The recipe in here was as follows.

I could see that this recipe had relatively more fat and was cooked at a higher temperature for less time so I decided to try it.

Remembering my earlier post about Sultana Oat cookies and the things that made them thick and soft as opposed to thin and crisp, I decided to use what I had learned in reverse and so use margarine instead of butter

and the broken up sort of oats rather than the more whole looking ones.

So having decided what to do I lined a swiss roll tin with a piece of old foil.

and gathered my ingredients.

I melted 6oz of margarine, 30z of demerera sugar and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup in a large saucepan

and added

8oz of oats.

I also picked out a handfull of dried apricots to put in one half of the mixture.

I spread the two mixtures out in the swiss roll tin (chopped up apricot in the part on the left)

and put them in the oven to cook.

As my oven is a Fan Oven I chose to cook them at 170deg C for 20 minutes.

After this time the edges were just beginning to colour so I decided that would be enough

and took them out and marked out sixteen pieces as instructed and left them to cool.

Now I had made a BIG mistake in thinking that a piece of foil would do instead of greasing the tin (and I should have known better. 😦 )

So I had terrible problems trying to get them out of the tin as the foil had stuck to the tin even more than it had stuck to the flapjacks.

And I was left with a bowl of crumbs and these that seemed worth laying out

The only thing to do was to sit down and try a couple with a mug of coffee.

Well! I can report that they are not hard or overly chewy but they are definitely crumbly.

Maybe next time I will stick to my Oat cookie recipe. Perhaps the flour and milk helps them hold together. And by choosing my ingredients, I can make a thicker softer more similar to flapjacks cookie if I want.