Recipe: Malteser Buns
I’ve been making these for years and they are always a big hit, especially with work colleagues. Make a batch, bring them to work to brighten up a Monday or celebrate a Friday and watch them disappear in record time.
And then use your malteser-bun-making-leverage to get people to do all those annoying little tasks you’ve been chasing them about for the last month. The way to get a response to an email is definitely through malty chocolately bribery!
‘Bun’ is generally used in Northern Ireland to refer to individually sized cake or traybake and doesn’t refer to the round bread roll that you put a burger into as in the rest of the UK. I find the use of the word ‘buns’ often cause much hilarity among my friends – so you could just as easily call these ‘Malteser Squares’.
Ingredients:
400g milk chocolate – though I usually suggest using high quality chocolate for baking I find something like Cadbury’s dairy milk works just fine for this recipe
200g butter
4 tbsp golden syrup
250g digestive biscuits
200g maltesers
250g white chocolate
75g maltesers, lightly crushed8" x 12" tin
Start by lining your tin with baking parchment. For this recipe I find it is really useful to line the bottom and up the two shorter sides of the tin leaving a bit of extra parchment sticking out at either end so you can easily lift out the traybake when it is set and ready to cut up. Use a little bit of flavourless oil to secure the parchment and to coat the non-lined sides of the tin.
Break up the milk chocolate into squares and cut the butter into cubes. Combine the milk chocolate, butter and golden syrup in a pyrex bowl and melt gently over a bain marie. Put a small amount of cold water in a saucepan and place the pyrex bowl over the top, ensuring the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Slowly bring the water to the boil, occasionally stirring the chocolate, butter and syrup mixture to encourage even melting.
Meanwhile, crush the digestive biscuits to a fine crumb. It’s easiest to do this in a food processor but you can also place the biscuits in a freezer bag and bash with a rolling pin or wine bottle until sufficiently crumb-like.
Now combine the crushed digestives, 200g maltesers (holding back the extra 75g for later) and completely melted milk chocolate, butter and syrup mixture in a large bowl. Stir well.
Press this mixture into the prepared baking tin, using a spatula (and maybe your hands – it’s a wee bit messy). Try to get the mixture as even as possible and I also try to ensure there is a reasonably even distribution of maltesers. Once the mixture is cool enough pop it into the fridge for about an hour to set.
After an hour, melt the white chocolate in a pyrex bowl over a bain marie (see above). Lightly crush the remaining 75g maltesers. You can do this is a food processor (use the pulse button) but it is probably easiest to do it in a bowl with the end of a rolling pin. I like to leave a few chunky bits.
Remove your baking tin of now hard chocolate maltiness from the fridge and evenly spread the white chocolate over the top. I find it easiest to pour it on to the middle and then use a spatula of palette knife to spread it out to the edges. Don’t worry if it mixes slightly with the milk chocolate below – it will still look great.
Then evenly sprinkle the remaining crushed maltesers over the top of the white chocolate, pressing them very lightly into the white chocolate to ensure they stick. Now pop the whole thing back in the fridge for another 30 minutes or so until completely set.
Take it out the fridge. Remove from the tin using the handy extra bits of parchment paper and cut up into whatever size you like. These are super rich so smaller is often better. Though, as you can see from the pictures, I’ve cut pretty generous slices for this most recent batch. Voila – Malteser Buns. You will be beloved by all.
