Molasses. Not a word I was very familiar with until day before yesterday. But then Jools reminded me of the homemade slabs of deliciousness that our friend Ricardo had brought along on one of a ‘training’ rides a few weeks ago.
Cyclists know a fair bit about sugar highs. Let’s face it, on a long and arduous ride carrying weight, you need all the highs you can get. For a while my favourite fix was Genoa cake, with its mushable mix of dried fruit and soft crumbly cake mix.
But that was before Ricardo turned up with his flapjacks. I’m not even sure ‘flapjack’ is the right word. Flapjacks are usually fairly dry and gob-stopping. Ricardo’s slices were moist, melt in the mouth, the lightest fruitiest airiest stodge you could ever bury down the gullet.
So yesterday, Jules WhatsApp’d to say that he’d got the recipe from Ricardo and made a batch. Yesterday was a busy day, full of mildly panicky sortées for last minute essentials. But I had to have a go at making my own supply…the memory of those slabs was so sweet.
So I biked up to the Co-op to pick up the ingredients. But they didn’t have molasses. They had Muscovado sugar, but apparently that won’t do. It had to be molasses…they were the heart and soul of Ric’s flapjacks. Just down the road there was a health food shop, and sure enough, they had a jar. It’s contents looked dark and mysterious. Promising.
Pouring the molasses out of the jar and into a waiting pan of melted butter was sensuality in motion. And now we’re laden with these chunky yet sweet and giving little squares of home-made energy, ready to propel us up those infamous Cornish hills tomorrow.
Andy M.
Ric’s Flapjacks
Ingredients
175g/6oz butter
175g/6oz molasses
175g/6oz mixed dried fruit – apricots, figs, raisins, cranberries, etc
350g/12oz porridge oats and mixed nuts and seeds about 50% oats and oatmeal and 50% bust and seeds.
Method
- Preheat the oven to 150C/130C Fan/Gas 2 and line a 20cm/8in square baking tin with baking paper.
- Melt the butter in a medium pan over a low heat. Dip a brush in the butter and brush the baking tin with a little bit of it. Add the molasses and fruit to the butter and heat gently. Once the butter has fully melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the porridge oats, nuts and seeds.
- Pack the mixture into the baking tin and squash down (it’s worth packing it down quite hard and leaving it under a weight while it cools). Bake in the oven for 40 minutes.
- Once cooked, remove from the oven, leave to cool for 15 minutes (or longer if it’s under a weight), then turn out onto a chopping board and cut into squares, and it must be squares not rectangles! 😁
Pedal well!!