Just add chocolate, or dates, or banana … 10 delicious flapjack recipes to suit every taste
Perhaps I am over-generalising, but I feel that the flapjack rarely migrates from the home economics class into everyday adult life. Yet at this moment, it hits all the notes: it is wholesome, very simple, you can bake it with children and you can throw any old nonsense in to no obvious ill effect. Plus, it needs no flour, which is great if you can’t get hold of any, and oats are incredibly good value. There is no kitchen alchemy involving things that have a habit of going wrong – no raising agent, no uncertainty from adding an egg.
I tried every which way, with the “help” of an outrageously careless 10year-old, to get one wrong, just for the suspense. There were rumours that tin size was important, that the wrong dimensions messed with the texture. It is true that a thinner flapjack will have a more biscuity, less squidgy mouthfeel, but biscuity is still fine, otherwise why would people eat biscuits? It is also true that the finer the oats, the more they hold together in the finished product, but even jumbo oats didn’t fall apart as I had been led to believe. But if this really worries you, you can make them finer by whizzing them first in a food processor, anyway.
Having said that all flapjacks are equally good, it would be contradictory to claim that these are the 10 best: think of them, rather, as a flapjack for every taste.
The nostalgia flapjack
The Pooh Cook Book, loosely based on the sensibilities of Winnie the Pooh, came out in 1971: if you were born between then and about 1985, it will have provided the building blocks of your first cooking experiences even if you never read it. Trust me, I was there.
Anyway, its flapjack – 50g butter, 50g sugar, 100g oats, one tablespoon of golden syrup, pinch of salt, 160C (140C fan/350F/gas mark 3) for 20 minutes – is basically a ration-book version of the classic recipe (generally, there is more fat than oats), and, with a much smaller yield, that should be enough for two hungry children. That’s what really stands out about recipes written before the 90s, how incredibly small they are.
The perfect flapjack
You want perfection, go to the person whose middle name it is: our