I don’t know how I thought of it, perhaps I was reminiscing, but somehow a few weeks back the memory of tan slice came back to me and I knew I had to make it! Back in high school we had the school canteen where I would often purchase my lunch (I think mum had given up making it by then). It never had the healthiest of options, (probably why I was a bit chub in the early pre-teen years) and one of the items was tan slice (or often called tan square). I have vivid memories of my girlfriends and I heading to our little grass spot in our lunch break, putting our bags down (so that everybody knew it was our territory and not to sit there) and then waltzing over the canteen to get a bag of chips and a tan slice for lunch. Mmmm nutritious. I swear I probably had the tan slice almost every day for a year. Okay, maybe not that often but I do remember eating a lot of it!
Tan slice is a delicious shortbread/caramel/choc-chip slice that melts in your mouth and is very similar to the traditional caramel slice. However, for some reason the tan slice doesn’t come across as sweet as the traditional version, which means you don’t feel so bad after eating it, which in turn is most likely a bad thing because you eat more (like 3 slices today for instance!!)
When I started looking for a recipe the other day I found only a few! It seems that the slice comes from my very own kiwiland as all the recipes came from blogs/websites from New Zealand!! Even when I asked my fellow Aussies here in Melbourne, they had never heard of it! I could not wait to introduce them to it! I found a recipe on a blog and tried it with slight alteration and it was amazing. I took the slice in to work today and got rave reviews from all my staff who ate two pieces each! (I had to eat the last one) and they could not stop raving about it. They even requested I make it for a staff meeting. I was so pleased with how it turned out and the presentation looked like the tan slice I remembered all those years ago. I know you will enjoy this! x
Tan Slice
Ingredients:
Base:
180g of butter, softened
90g of sugar
½ tsp of vanilla extract (or essence)
300g of plain flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1/2 cup chocolate chips
Caramel:
1x 400g tin condensed milk (I used the light version to feel less guilty and it worked perfectly)
100g butter
2 tbsp golden syrup
Method:
- Pre-heat oven to 180 C and line a 23cm square tin with baking paper.
- Cream butter and sugar together and then stir in vanilla.
- Add dry ingredients and mix until combined. Mixture will be like a crumbly dough.
- Press 2/3 of the mixture in to the prepared tin and put in fridge to harden while you make caramel. The base should be quite thin as it will rise and you don’t want to drown out the caramel with too much shortbread.
- To make the caramel, combine all ingredients in a saucepan over low heat. Stir continuously until butter has melted and mixture has thickened slightly.
- Pour caramel over base. Mix in chocolate chips with remaining dough mixture and then crumble over top of caramel.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes until the caramel is just starting to brown. Leave to cool completely in tin before slicing.
- Enjoy!! xx
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