The Old-School Chocolate Caramel Slice That Always Disappears First

This is not a fancy slice. Or a tricky one. It doesn’t photograph particularly well and looks much the same on your friend’s beaten up old chopping board as on a pretty plate. This one is not at all about appearances. It’s the go-to. The old-school. The one your eyes follow if someone carries it into morning tea. The one that sells out first at the fete.

I’m sure you’ve made it before. You possibly even have the recipe handwritten in an exercise book in your twelve-year-old handwriting. If you ever lose that book, you know you can come back to this website and if you do a search you’ll find a few versions of it, including this one! (Better still, commit it to memory. Really. A slice like this is important, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

When we moved home and Mum and Dad built a new house on the farm, they moved out of the old farmhouse and left behind some heirlooms like this (pictured): the tin I cooked my very first slice in. It’s so beaten up, it’s made countless slices, and it feels a bit like a moment in time, when we all made slices instead of buying them.

When we knew exactly what was in them. Possibly before we understood blood sugar crashes and had ever heard the term ‘insulin resistant.’

I was surprised when a chocolate caramel slice recently became the centre of a hotly contested plagiarism case. Before I understood that that case was less about the ingredients and more about the wording of the recipe, I struggled to understand how anyone could own something so general, like a scone recipe, haven’t we all been making this since we were twelve?

However, and notwithstanding the many many chocolate caramel slices made by my hands, I managed to make a grave error of timing last time I made this particular slice, and it was not AT ALL set when I needed to leave to take it to a friend’s place.

I covered it with foil and put it on the passenger’s seat and it still wasn’t set when I arrived a full five minutes later. Darn it. (Also the one downside to living in the country. No long car trips with aircon on high to firm up unfirm slices.)

I stuck it in Linda’s freezer and pulled it out forty-five minutes and two cups of tea and about sixteen serious belly laughs later. It did not look particularly pretty. But really, as I said at the beginning, no one cares what this one looks like. It’s a chocolate caramel slice – a happy-dance in a mouthful.

Makes 16 pieces
Ingredients
Base

150 g (1 cup) Self-raising Flour <please LINK> NOT YET PUBLISHED column!
45 g (½ cup) desiccated coconut
155 g (⅔  cup, firmly packed) Brown Sugar
125 g (½  cup) butter, melted

Caramel

2 x 395 g (14 oz) tins sweetened condensed milk, or 500 ml (2 cups) homemade
60 g (¼  cup) butter
100gm (4 tbsp) golden syrup

Topping

200 g milk or dark chocolate, melted

Method

Preheat your oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line an 18 x 28 cm (7 x 11 in) slice tin (the more loved and used the better, just saying.)

Combine all the base ingredients together and press into the prepared tin. Bake for 10 minutes. Allow to cool.
Stir all the caramel ingredients together in a saucepan over a low heat until the butter is melted and everything is nicely amalgamated. Keep stirring for about 6 minutes, or until the caramel changes colour to golden. Pour or spread over the cooled base and bake for another 10 minutes at 180°C (350°F).
When the caramel has cooked and then had time to cool slightly, spread with the melted chocolate.
Allow at least 2 hours to set in the fridge, but heck, the freezer for 45 minutes worked for me. Best shared with girls you adore if at all possible.

Recipe adapted from Fiona Weir’s book “From Scratch” published by Hardie Grant 2022, photography by Alan Benson