Sticky Slices (Reprise)

I was seized by a strange, unnatural urge earlier today.  I fought it.  But it was too strong.  I had to do it.  Yes...I cleaned my kitchen.  I should explain that I am not what you'd call a dedicated cleaner of things household (or, in fact, of things of any kind).  My Mum recently described me (rather brilliantly) as "an only occasional housekeeper". 

However, today for some strange reason I didn't feel like being in the garden.  There was plenty to do, and only one or two hailstorms marring the pale-blue April skies and fluffy white racing clouds, but it was to be an inside day, and the kitchen was on my hit list.  I wiped down my walls and tiles and cupboard doors, I scrubbed my oven doors- to digress slightly, I know exactly when I last did that, because I uploaded the photos to facebook and I'm just looking at them now - oh my goodness, that's freaky!  It was this exact day, 14th April, in 2009!  Must be a response to the number of hours daylight or something, like lemmings....  Freakish date coincidence aside and looking instead at the year, no wonder they took a bit of scrubbing.  Ahem.  Anyway.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Then I cleared out the drawers and the cupboard under the sink, and gave them a good scrubbing out, then scrubbed my dish-drainer and cutlery drainer-thing, and cleaned the sink and rinsed out the drains with caustic soda, I cleaned the windows, I washed the floor...goodness me I was busy. 

I finished about 5 o'clock which was the perfect time for a nice cup of tea and something sweet - how fortuitous then that last night Alastair and I had reprised the Sticky Slices recipe I tried last weekend.  Alastair is out walking today, and I had decided to use the ingredients from the Sticky Slices recipe to create something rather less sticky that would be suitable to take walking.  We had in mind something a bit like one of these, to which we're both rather partial. 

Accordingly, we melted the butter and golden syrup and mixed hazelnuts and broken-up digestive biscuits into the liquid.  We poured it into a greased and lined loaf tin, and left it to cool for an hour or so.  Then we poured the melted chocolate on top of the butter/golden syrup/hazelnut/digestive biscuit mix.  The idea was that the chocolate would hold the bar together, making it suitable to be eaten on a fell-side.

It looked like this...

Hopes were high, but sadly this morning Alastair decreed it too sticky to take out with him.  I think he could have put it in a tupperware container and eaten it quite happily with nothing worse than slightly sticky fingers, because the chocolate did, indeed, hold each bar together, although the butter/golden syrup/hazelnut/digestive biscuit mix was a bit sticky - as you can see, the digestive chunks had kind of dissolved into the butter/golden syrup mixture.

 His loss, however, was my gain, because it tasted absolutely delicious after a day's cleaning!