Lebkuchen & a huge Caramel Slice!

About a week ago I made some Lebkuchen using one of my nice sparkly new baking books from Christmas, The Great British Bake Off: How to turn everyday bakes into showstoppers.  It didn't stay sparkly for long!  These soft, spiced, light cakes are ridiculously addictive, but I was surprised to find no flour listed in the ingredients.  Like the curious beast I am I decided, for once, to follow the recipe to the letter and see what happened.  As far as I could tell they would end up as Lebkuchen style meringues.  I wasn't wrong.

It appears that original recipes for this delectable German delight vary depending on the area they were made.  Most had flour, some didn't.  My personal taste is with flour, although the ones I made were light and crumbly and no less delicious!

Here they are in all their huge, palm-sized glory.

Rather large Lebkuchen!

Next time I'll make them bite-sized and dip their little bottoms in chocolate.  At some point I also intend to try a flour-based recipe.  Maybe I could make them at the same time and do a taste test.  If you decide to make these without flour, be extremely careful when handling them; they're very, very delicate.

Right, onto the next.  This slab of chocolatey goodness is one big Caramel Slice, or as some would call it 'Millionaire's Shortbread', which to me is just plain wrong!  Sorry.

A slab of Caramel Slice

This is what I made today ready for a colleague's birthday this week.  He has no clue it's sitting there waiting for him like a crunchy, soft, sweet heart attack waiting to happen.  I did consider making a cake, but there's a little running joke about caramel slices and I just couldn't resist making one huge one for him (it's about 9x13"), and pimping it up Kirsty stylee.  Yes, yes I did just type that.  No, I'm not going to delete it.

Essential close-up of the slab!
The sweets on top are Curly Wurly, Maltesers, Smarties and fingers of Fudge.

The recipe I used is here (BBC Good Food website), and I did change this one.  My experience of using extra sugar when making the caramel with condensed milk is that is crystalises incredibly easily, leaving a very grainy mouth-feel when it's eaten.  So I omitted the sugar, I used unsalted butter in both the shortbread and the caramel and I added a little salt to each separately.  You might think this an odd thing to do, but it just means I can control the salt content precisely to my needs and taste, and this recipe really does need a touch of salt to take the edge off the sweetness, even without the additional sweets on top and the extra sugar in the caramel!

I also baked the shortbread for 30 minutes instead of the 20 recommended.  When a recipe doesn't specify a 'fan assisted' oven temperature and the book/recipe doesn't make it clear either way, I always assume it's not and I knock 20 off the total.  So I baked for 30 minutes, 160 fan, but kept a good eye on it just in case.

It would have been incredibly easy to chop a big slice off the edge.  My colleague would never have known, and I'd be sitting here with a big chocolate/caramel/sweeties grin on my face while waiting for the sugar crash to knock me out for the evening.  I behaved.  I only cut off the tiniest sliver from each end to make it fit into its carry box.  I'm talking millimetres.  It was hardly enough for even a mouthful.

I don't blow my own trumpet often, but what little I did taste was friggin lush!  You really should try it.  I mean really, it's all I can do not to go back to it, pick it up in that one big slab and sink my teeth into it.

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