For me, first impressions are everything!! Making a strong first impression, especially face to face with someone, is so important to me. It is for this reason that the first thing my guests see when I welcome them into my house is a cake tray of some homemade welcome treats. They are a great ice-breaker, and also show my guests that I’ve made the effort and really want to make them feel welcome.

So every day I put out some bite sized homemade treats in a tray by the front door, I usually try to make sure it’s a different treat everyday, so that my guests who are staying a few days are able to taste something different everyday. This also is a great outlet for my need to bake (especially with chocolate).

Yesterday I experimented with a different chocolate biscuit cake than I normally do. I normally use marshmallows and malteasers to bulk up the biscuit cake, but a packet of crystallised ginger in my baking pantry caught my eye. I decided to make a salty spicy concoction instead of a super sweet rocky road style cake. I tell you, I am head over heels so in love with the combination that I felt I had to write the ingredients down (via a blog post) immediately.

Ingredients

• 300g of dark chocolate
• 200g of chocolate digestive biscuits (Ginger nut would have been better, but these were grand)
• 50g of crystallised ginger, finely chopped
• 100g of salted peanuts
• 100g of butter
• 3 tbsp of golden syrup

Method

1. Melt the butter, chocolate, & golden syrup in a pan over a very low heat.
2. Crush the biscuits.
3. Add the biscuits, nuts and ginger to the melted mixture and stir to combine.
4. Pour the mixture into a loaf tin or square tin lined with foil. (I actually used a silicone loaf tin.)
5. Press down and spread evenly in the tin.
6. Chill for a few hours, before turning out and chopping into slices.
7. Store in a sealed container in the fridge.

(I do not have any photos of the method, not that it was rocket science, as it was a complete experiment, and I hadn’t planned on sharing. Then I tasted it and was like, WTF!!!!!Wowzer!, I gotta share, so yummy. 🙂 )