Recipe #26 of NEWrecipes52 ...

I've been on the look out for a recipe for millionaire's shortcake for some time now. DH loves the stuff! I, on the other hand, find it waaaaaay too sweet for my taste buds. But just because I'm not keen on it, doesn't mean to say I'm not going to try it.

The recipe is taken from the Primrose Bakery cookbook and they call them caramel slices rather than millionaire's shortcake, but it's basically the same thing ...


Here's the assembled ingredients, including x2 tins of condensed milk, an ingredient I've never cooked with before ...


The base of the shortcake is a biscuit like crumb, with added coconut for flavour and texture ...


The crumbs were put into a prepared (greased and lined) oven proof dish ...


Spread out evenly and packed down using the back of a spoon and baked in a pre-heated oven (180oC) for 10 minutes ...


Whilst the base was baking, I prepared the caramel, which combined golden syrup, butter and both tins of condensed milk ...


Now this is where things got a bit hazy ... the recipe said to melt the butter into the syrup / milk mixture and then cook for about 7-10minutes until the mixture thickened and darkened slightly. It didn't say whether the heat should be increased or the mixture stirred whilst cooking?!?!?!


Anyhoo, after about 10 minutes, the caramel still didn't seam to have thickened or darkened, but I poured it over the baked crumb base anyway and returned it the oven for a further 20 minutes of cooking. Here's how it looked after those 20 minutes ...


Eeeeeeekkkkk!!!! Not what I expected at all! Heck, how on earth could I salvage this?!?!? Well, actually, once the caramel had cooled (about 3hrs!!!), the bubbled top, actually came off quite easily and I was left with this evenly coloured caramel base ...


Next stage was the dark chocolate topping ...


The chocolate was melted in a bain marie, along with 2tbsp of corn oil ...


Super glossy ...


I let the chocolate firm up overnight, then dusted the whole slab with cocoa powder ...


Then divided the slab into 24 squares of gooey, caramel goodness ...


As I mentioned earlier, I'm not really a fan of caramel, but I think the bitter sweet dark chocolate adds the perfect balance to the super sweet caramel centre. Not bad, even if I say so myself ...