White Chocolate, Orange and Ginger Flapjacks

These aren't particularly festive, but I wanted to enter the We Should Cocoa Challenge with this Christmas present that I was planning to make for my mother. The challenge was thought up by two food bloggers, Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot, and the idea is that every month one of them sets up a challenge where the food blogger has to create a recipe that contains chocolate and a given ingredient. This month the ingredient was orange, and having just discovered the challenge I thought that I'd give it a go.

I based the recipe on my original flapjack recipe, adding orange and ginger to it and leaving out the dark chocolate. My mother loves ginger and white chocolate so I thought that this combination would be perfect for her - I hope she likes it!

I was completely overwhelmed by the response to the giant cupcake that I posted on Wednesday - it already has more page views than anything else that I've posted. I linked to it on my facebook and my friends all seemed to go crazy for it. K commented the link to tell me how much she enjoyed the cake and that she couldn't think of any improvements, which is always good to know. I was also told how professional it looked by EH. I'm so pleased with it!.

I've been thinking about maybe making a facebook profile for this blog so that people who aren't my real life friends can follow it, because I know that to follow a blog on this site you have to be a member of Google mail or something - you may see a link to such a page after Christmas as a result.

I mentioned baking with S of My Mind's Eye in my last post -  this took place yesterday and went surprisingly well considering that neither of us is a piping expert. We were trying to copy iambaker's ruffle cake with an ornament inside, and though the ruffles were successful, the piping bag exploded (we fixed it temporarily with clingfilm), the cakes didn't rise very well and the 'ornament' in the middle of the cake wasn't really a good colour because it looked a bit mouldy. I didn't post the recipe because it was really a straightforward copy of the one above and because it was all so chaotic that I didn't take any photos. Here are the ones taken by S:

Mouldy appearance in centre...

Thanks to S for the photos!

Anyway, below is the recipe for the flapjacks that I made. I'm quite pleased with them and they are quite fragrant so perhaps they do tick the Christmassy box after all.

Ingredients

• 300g Butter
• 180g Light Muscovado Sugar
• 6Tbsp Golden Syrup
• 200g Oats
• 200g White Chocolate
• Rind of One Orange
• 2Tsp Ground Ginger

Recipe

• Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan and line a roasting tin or deep baking tray.
• Melt the butter, sugar, orange rind and golden syrup together in a heavy-based saucepan over a low heat.

• Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the ground ginger.
• Fold the oats into the sugary mixture and scoop into the baking tray.
• Smooth the oat mixture with a spatula or other flat object, making sure that the oats are tightly packed.

I was making half the recipe because it was a gift, therefore I used a loaf tin.

• Cook the flapjack mixture in the oven for 20 minutes, or until it turns golden brown.
• Melt the white chocolate in a pan over a low heat, then pour it over the flapjack mixture. Leave it to set.

The spoon looks a bit oversized in comparison to the pan, doesn't it?

• Slice the flapjacks into bite sized pieces, serve and enjoy!

 As always, if you want to know how to do something that isn't written in detail here, or you don't understand some of the baking jargon I've used, don't hesitate to visit The Basics.

I'm not sure what I'm going to make next week yet, so it'll be a bit of a surprise post. I know I want to make some sort of new year cake, and I should be doing some baking with E so look out for mentions of those!

Happy Christmas!