I don’t know about you, but my brain has felt like soup for the last week. If I were to see you in real life, I would probably say to you ‘My brain feels like soup; does yours?’ and then 10 minutes later I’d ask the same question, because my brain is soup and I am incapable of normal human behavior. I am, it turns out, not made for heat. Or at least, not made for it in a context where I’m required to work and commute and make decisions and reply sensibly to emails, rather than lie in the shade on a sun lounger reading a trashy book until it’s time to go out for dinner and cocktails.
In England where I live, we are simply not made for such scorching temperatures. We don’t have the infrastructure, or the air-conditioning; our architecture doesn’t lend itself to cool rooms or temperate, shaded courtyards. Our public transport overheats, our homes overheat, our offices overheat, we overheat.
So, spending the last couple of weeks in the kitchen, wrestling with butter-rich pastries and yeasted doughs as the thermometer gradually rose above 97°F, has been something of a trial. As I stood over pots of custard and jam and steamed puddings, I wondered how masochistic you had to be to turn on the oven voluntarily in this weather.
As I dreamed of upping sticks and moving to Alaska, or maybe just into my freezer (if I moved out the ice creams and oven chips, I think it would be big enough), I resolved to make life easier, and slightly cooler, for myself.
Step forward refrigerator cake. Refrigerator cake isn’t big or clever, but frankly I’m not terribly interested in big or clever at the moment. I’m interested in cold, easy and delicious. And the refrigerator cake delivers that in spades: simple, satisfying, no-bake and something you can eat straight from the fridge. Similar to tiffin or rocky road, it combines chocolate with butter and syrup and coats various different biscuity, fruity, chocolatey bits and chills them into a brick, firm enough to slice, but soft enough to bite.
Where my refrigerator cake differs from the more traditional tiffin, is that I set whole chocolate bars into it. Yes, it’s silly — and people absolutely love it. No two refrigerator cakes are the same; it entirely depends which chocolate bars I fancy on a given day. Standing in the air-conditioned aisle of my nearest supermarket, I had no particular desire to leave. But ultimately I came away with Turkish Delight, Milky Ways, a Crunchie and a Snickers — all of which will give different textures and colors and flavors, but also will look striking and contrasting in the cross-section of a slice.
Where my refrigerator cake differs from the more traditional tiffin, is that I set whole chocolate bars into it.
Think of the below as a template, rather than gospel. The whole point of refrigerator cake is that it is easy and made entirely to your tastes and the contents of your cupboards. If you’d rather, use digestives or shortbread or hobnobs in place of Rich Teas. If you have a more mature palate than mine, you may like to use a greater proportion of dark chocolate. And of course, choose whichever chocolate bars your heart desires.
Refrigerator cake
Makes: 8 big slabs
Takes: 5 minutes, plus chilling
Bakes: No time at all
5¼ oz milk chocolate, broken into pieces
3½ oz dark chocolate, broken into pieces
3½ oz butter
3½ oz golden syrup
¼ teaspoon fine salt
3½ oz Rich Tea biscuits
3½ oz dried fruit (I used figs)
5¼ oz mixed chocolate bars
- Line a 2lb loaf tin with a wide strip of greaseproof paper
- In a pan, over a low heat, melt together the milk and dark chocolate, butter and golden syrup and salt, stirring, until the mixture is glossy and uniform. Remove from the heat
- Break the Rich Tea biscuits up into chunks approximately an inch wide. If your dried fruit are large, slice them to a similar size. Place the biscuits and fruit in a large bowl and pour the chocolate mixture over the top. Stir to coat the biscuits and fruit and evenly distribute the chocolate
- Spoon half of this rubbly chocolatey mixture into the tin. Tessellate your chocolate bars on top of the rubble so that they are evenly spread in one or two even layers in the tin. Spoon the other half of the rubbly chocolatey mixture on top, and gently encourage down the sides, between the chocolate bars, and into an even layer using a spatula or spoon
- Refrigerate for at least four hours, or overnight. Once firm and chilled, use the greaseproof paper to help you lift the slab from the tin — you may need to release each end of the chocolate with a knife to help this
- Slice into big, fat slabs. If your refrigerator cake is very cold, you may find dipping your knife in hot water, wiping it and then cutting, produces neater slices
This article was originally published on Spectator Life.
