This pandemic is bring some interesting things to light. I haven’t asked yet, so I don’t know what Mike’s discovered about me that he hadn’t already learned in 51+ glorious years of marriage. But I recently learned that he used to make jigsaw puzzles as a kid, and has always been interested in them – who’d have known? However, it does explain his aptitude for forensic geology, due diligence and the like; the puzzle solving processes that often draw on his extensive knowledge of the history of mining.
Mike also reads recipes and watches cookery shows at times, too. He sees a recipe he likes the sound of, gathers the ingredients and makes it, at last once. Several family favourites began with him finding a recipe that went down well.
Recently he found a set of some timeless favourite classic recipes for slices, like that one with cherry and coconut filling on a shortbread base and topped with chocolate, or the classic vanilla slice. It must have stirred longings; next day he brought home some seriously yummy vanilla slice and apple slices from the wonderful panaderia down the road. And of course, in the quedate en casa / stay at home quarantine we’re in, we can’t go out to eat in a restaurant and sometimes order a dessert we’d never make at home. We do often have a couple of chocolates as we watch our tv serial at night, but this must all be be getting to him, because out of the blue, a couple of days ago Mike triumphantly announced he’d located all the ingredients for chocolate crackles, and what he bought here in Uruguay is pictured here:
I hadn’t given these amazingly delicious, sinfully calorie-laden things a thought for decades. Not only are our kids both middle aged, I’d never seen blocks of copha here, and don’t take much notice of breakfast cereals beyond the toasted mueslis I like anyway, so it’s decades since I thought of making some. In our day, at every kid’s birthday party they were as mandatory as Fairy Bread, about which I wrote a while back.
This classic Chocolate Crackles recipe appears on the back of every packet of Rice Bubbles in Australia:
CHOCOLATE CRACKLES
- 4 cups Kellogg’s® Rice Bubbles®
- 1 cup icing sugar
- 1 cup dessicated coconut
- 250g copha®*, chopped
- 3 Tbsp cocoa.
Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl, melt the copha and add to the mixture, stir well, allow to cool and put into paper cups while still soft. Makes 24. Refrigerate.