Caramelised Milk Chocolate & Espresso Shortbread

For the past ten days or so - ever since I got back to Oxford - I've been in the midst of one of those patches where every recipe I try seems to go wrong. It drives me up the wall (and, occasionally, drives tears down my face).

Earlier this evening I was reading The Year in Food when I came across Kimberly's description of weeks like these: "Where one week will feel smooth and productive, another will feel like I am trying to herd cats – the recipes are stubborn and lopsided and resist coaxing to the place where I’d like them to go." It inspired me to finally stop procrastinating and herd some words onto the screen.



To be honest, life seems to be full of herding unruly and unpredictable cats at the moment. One opportunity turns up, then disappears, then mutates, then another appears, changes, tangles, clashes and so on. Every opportunity I'm getting at the moment - both food and teaching related - is a challenge and seems designed to push me to my limits and out of my comfort zone.

I know that's a good thing and nothing makes you learn faster - but it doesn't make it any less dizzying or scary. Especially when everything is going wrong, the days are vanishing and the deadlines are looming.





Thankfully caramelised milk chocolate never seems to fail and this shortbread behaved itself impeccably three times in a row, like a little purring cat. Most of my recipes for this chunk of time seem to be finally coming into control too, perhaps taking note from these two.

Yet this obedient shortbread wasn't the first version of this post. My first idea was to make some viennese biscuits - you know, the ones that you pipe into nice shapes then dip into chocolate.

I couldn't find a trustworthy recipe to try out and surprise, surprise, the one I picked didn't go well. They literally resisted being coaxed into the right shape. I stood there squeezing and squeezing on the piping bag full of mixture, trying to make the dough come out. The piping bag became streaked with pale stretch marks but the mixture wouldn't budge.



In the end, I snipped the tip off and formed the biscuits by hand. Once baked, they were bland and boring. My guess is that getting it to a pipeable consistency that won't spread in the oven while maintaining taste is pretty difficult, so I shelved it for a later date. Do you have a good recipe for them? I'd love to know.

So, aware that I really needed something to just work, I went back to my Whole Vanilla Bean Shortbread and adapted from there. When I was tasting all the milk chocolate last week I kept thinking that coffee would go really well with it, so I flavoured it with espresso powder. I haven't tried it with real espresso but I imagine it would work too.

I also tried two more chocolates: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Belgian Fairtrade Milk Chocolate (£1.39) and Tesco Finest 40% Cook's British Milk Chocolate (£1.28). Both worked well and were cheaper than all of the ones I tried last time. The Tesco one has a totally inexplicable but pleasant honey aftertaste.



I tried drizzling the biscuits with chocolate, spreading it on the bottom and sandwiching. The sandwiches won both on taste and because you can't see the chocolate cloud once it's cooled.

Finally, while I really like making the caramelised milk chocolate and I do think it's worth it, for this recipe I think you could just melt the chocolate and stir the pinch of salt through if you don't have time. It won't be quite the same but I think they'd still be delicious.

The light coffee and chocolate flavours remind me of opera cake - it's such a good combination. These are the sort of buttery biscuits that come in a fancy tin (though, made at home, they're a bit fresher).



Caramelised Milk Chocolate & Espresso Shortbread

For the chocolate:
100g milk chocolate*
pinch of fleur de sel or fine sea salt

For the shortbread:
100g unsalted butter, cold to the touch but not rock solid
50g caster sugar
1 tsp espresso powder
1/2 tsp boiling water
2 pinches fine sea salt
135g plain flour

For the caramelised milk chocolate, heat the oven to 120C/250F. Break the chocolate up and place in a small oven dish. Place in the oven and bake for 5 minutes, then take out and stir until smooth. Repeat every 10 minutes until it has been baking for 65. Stir in a pinch of salt then scrape into a bowl to cool.

Put the butter, sugar, combined espresso powder/water and salt into the bowl of a food processor. Blend until you have a smooth paste. Add the flour then blend until the dough forms clumps (you may need to scrape down once or twice). Tip out onto a sheet of baking parchment then form into a square. Roll out, turning the dough by a 1/4 between turns and trying to keep a square shape, until it is 3-4mm thick. Place on a tray and put in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 170C/340F to bake the biscuits. Lightly grease a baking tray. Trim the sides and cut into squares - I use the width of my ruler, which is 3.5cm, and cut along it for a straight edge. You should have about 26 squares with a few odd shaped offcuts (I had 7 partial squares last time). Place onto the tray and into the oven and bake for 9-11 minutes, turning the tray halfway through. Leave to cool for a few minutes on the tray then remove to a rack.

When the biscuits have cooled, pair them up according to size then sandwich them with the chocolate (you may well need to re-melt it to spread it - place the bowl over a pan of simmering water). They keep for a few days in a sealed tin.

(Makes about 13 sandwiches or 26 singles + a few odd shaped ones)

* I used about 60g of the milk chocolate to fill the biscuits but I haven't tested caramelising less than 100g. If you're not caramelising it, perhaps try melting 70g (for a little leeway).



Some more recipes that include coffee:
2009: Coffee and Walnut Cake
2011: Tiramisu
2013: Toscakaka (Caramel Almond Cake)
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Caramelised Milk Chocolate

You've heard of caramelised white chocolate, right? It's been popping up all over the place since Food 52 posted about it a few weeks ago. I joined in and made Caramelised White Chocolate Éclairs filled with softly whipped cream. Just the memory of them makes me feel a bit weak at the knees.

One day when I was testing for the éclairs, I asked mum to get some extra chocolate from the shops. When she came back there was a bar of Frey Milk in amongst the selection, a sweet and creamy Swiss chocolate that she'd mistaken for a bar of white.

So, ever curious, I decided to see what happened if I applied the same process to milk chocolate.



For the first thirty minutes, nothing seemed to change. Then another flavour started to creep in, bit by bit. Once finished and cooled, it was quite different. It's not as big a change as with white, but I rather like it.

It's still sweeter and creamier than dark chocolate, but it's richer and more complex than usual. The difference is hard to describe - there's a touch of extra caramel, a bit of bitterness (even a touch of sourness in one of the chocolates I tried) and a roasted-coffee depth. The salt, as ever, heightens the flavours and takes the edge off the sweetness. Unlike white chocolate the colour doesn't change, though it does thicken a little. The flavour deepens as it cools.



I couldn't find much information on caramelised milk chocolate, though quite a few chocolate manufacturers talk of caramel notes and caramelised nuts are often folded through or paired with it (i.e. this is the first time I've ever googled an idea and not been able to find anything specifically about it. Cue shock and an uneasy feeling.)

In the oven it stiffens and the surface becomes rough, but it all smooths out if you work it with a spatula. You can see the difference the oven makes in this pair of photos (the first is after 5 minutes of baking, once the melted chunks - as above - have been stirred, and the second is after ten more minutes i.e. 15 in total):




Given all the talk about how you need to buy expensive, professional brands to make caramelised white chocolate (certainly never pick something conveniently from the supermarket), I thought it would be interesting to see what people thought of caramelised milk chocolate made with a variety of different brands.

I haven't organised a blind taste test since 2010. The first one I did was for chocolate hazelnut spreads, where I roped in four friends to taste Nutella, two other brands and a homemade version. Later in the year I organised a larger test for vanilla ice cream - four brands and two homemade versions tested by ten people. They're good, geeky fun - at least for me (though I've never had a complaint...).

So I persuaded five neighbours to come round and eat chocolate for me.



For the test, I tried six types of chocolate (the price is per 100g, calculated from the amount I paid):

Valrhona Jivara (£5.71)
Green & Black's Milk (£2)
Green & Black's Creamy Milk (£2)
Hotel Chocolat Milk 40% Cooking Chocolate (£1.87)
Lindt Excellence Extra Creamy Milk (£1.85)
Marks & Spencer Milk Chocolate (£1.49)

There were so many brands and types I wanted to try but in the end I had to stop somewhere (stirring every ten minutes, hour on hour, was messing with my mind). I tried to create a range of prices and cocoa/milk percentages. (As always, I bought all of the ingredients myself and do not have any links to any of the brands.)

The six were all baked at 120C/250F for 65 minutes, stirring after the first five minutes and then every ten. I used 100g of each, except for the Valrhona, which was 70g (due to the packet size). As I wanted to do two at a time, I used glass dishes as I don't have two appropriate metal dishes. A pinch of fleur de sel was stirred in at the end of the process, before it was all scraped into a numbered bowl and cooled. Once firm, I sliced it into squares for easier tasting.



I asked my testers to make comments (including on the suspected price) and then rank them. I then scored them so that their top choice received 6 points, the second 5 and so on. The result:

1 - M&S
2 - Lindt
3 = Hotel Chocolat
3 = Valrhona
4 - G&B Milk
5 - G&B Creamy Milk

As you can see, the rank is almost reversed in comparison with the price list. The Valrhona divided opinion, with two testers putting it last and the others ranking it highly (though only one placed it first). None guessed that it was the most expensive (I should note that if I had wanted to have a kilo of it, I could have reduced the price per 100g to £2.59). The G&B Creamy Milk behaved weirdly - it didn't seem to roast like the others and kept a milder, neutral flavour.

The amount of cocoa and milk didn't seem to make a huge difference. The M&S has 36% cocoa and a minimum of 26% milk, very similar to the G&B Milk (34%, min 25%), whereas the Lindt has 30% cocoa and a minimum of 20% milk.



The only ingredient that did make a visible difference was the amount of cocoa butter. The series of photos are of the Green & Black's Milk, which goes particularly thick when you roast it. Cocoa butter is the fourth ingredient in its list, compared with the fluid Valrhona, where it is the top ingredient.

Interestingly, the M&S chocolate lists 'caramelised sugar syrup' as an ingredient, which probably added to the effect. Other common flavourings included vanilla and malt (though the Hotel Chocolat has no flavourings, presumably as it's for cooking).

Obviously it's a small, imperfect test, but I think it shows that you can get a delicious result with a variety of chocolates. Perhaps it would have been different if I'd tried other brands or had a gathering of professional pastry chefs and world class chocolate experts around my table (but then when do I ever feed them?).

I think that the caramelisation and salt makes the most difference to the cheaper chocolates, where the conversion of the pure sweetness to a richer, deeper flavour is most needed.



So there you go. A little experiment. I'll be back next week with a recipe that uses some of my rather large pile of caramelised milk chocolate...

For the moment, my tip is to toss a few chunks into a mug then pour steaming hot milk over the top. Leave for a few minutes, then stir or whisk together. It makes glorious hot chocolate.



A few more recipes that use milk chocolate:
2009: Triple Chocolate and Pecan Cookies
2010: Milk Chocolate and Hazelnut Biscuits
2013: Champagne Truffles