Caramel Fingers - An Heirloom Recipe Series

Not A Slice, Not A Biscuit, A Bar? - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another Heirloom Recipe on Extra Food Chat with Kath!

The recipe I am sharing today is not quite a slice and not quite a biscuit. The texture is a little denser than I would expect from a slice, but a bit softer than most biscuits. So I guess that’s why they are called Fingers (or maybe bars would be appropriate too).

I found this recipe in one of the notebooks with handwritten recipes from my Grandma. The handwriting is a little different in some of these recipes, this one included. I’m not sure if this is because it was written out by my Grandma, or even her sister, during childhood or I suppose there is a possibility this particular notebook belonged to their mother or another relative. The recipes in it seem older, and often more frugal. Sometimes for things I’m not sure I even want to try! The notebook is very battered, it no longer has a cover and when I look through it I have that unmistakeable feeling of having dust all over my hands after.

It is quite delicate, like most of the notebooks I now have from Grandma’s collection. And like all the notebooks she has written recipes in, they don’t just go from beginning to end. There are some recipes in the front, some in the middle and some at the back, all with many blank pages in between. I have to carefully look through them all so I don’t miss any random recipes written down away from all the other pages that have been used.

There are sometimes other bits and pieces that have been placed into the notebooks, like recipes written down on scraps of paper or recipe cards that have come from some food related product.

There are a couple of Mother’s Choice Flour recipe pamphlets scattered throughout the notebooks, and this recipe for Caramel Fingers seems to have been from something like that too (or maybe the back of a flour packet?). The original recipe says to use ‘1 cup Mother’s Choice flour sifted’, so I assume the recipe must come from Mother’s Choice.

Mother’s Choice flour isn’t one I recognise, but when I mentioned it to my Mum she said her mother also bought that brand of flour and did try some of the recipes too. As I found with the first test of this recipe (it didn’t work well), Mum said her Mum often found the recipes didn’t turn out well.

As you can see in the photo of the original recipe, only 1 tbsp of shortening is asked for in the whole recipe. In my experience that little fat in baked goods like this one isn’t enough, but I went with it the first time I tried these, using butter instead. As I had thought, 1 tbsp butter is certainly not enough to make a nice baked good, and this recipe was extremely dry. It was hard to melt the butter and sugar together on the stove with so little butter, and the final mixture could barely take up all the space in the tin.

I increased the quantity of butter significantly the next time, and it worked much better! Also, after a taste test I decided a nice lemon drizzle would also elevate the recipe a bit (with thanks to my Mum for that suggestion), and it made the Caramel Fingers just that much more delicious.

While I did feel I could keep tinkering with this recipes a few more times to make it more like a slice, I had to keep reminding myself that it is not a slice. I am also not trying to completely reinvent the recipes in this heirloom recipe series. Ideally I’d like to make as few changes to them as possible, whilst still sharing a recipe with you that I think is worth making. It is sometimes a challenge to balance those two things when testing these heirloom recipes, but in this case I think the changes I made only enhance the recipe (I would absolutely not recommend making it in it’s original form!).

Have you heard of Mother’s Choice flour? I’m not sure when it was last sold, or if it was bought out by another brand, but their advertisements I found online, along with the little recipe pamphlets I found in my Grandma’s collection feel very 1950s.