h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I bought two tins of it a few months ago when it was on sale and it's about time I did something with them.

Anything that can be paired with custard will be favourably looked upon

We did a ginger toffee pie a while back - crumbled ginger nut biscuits as a base with boiled condensed milk as the toffee filling. And some proper whipped cream on the top.

I'm afraid all the recipe was made up on the spot, so no recipe to link you to.

It was sticky, difficult to eat, but totally worth it.

do you mean the Condensed milk that we know in the UK (very very gloopy? used in making toffee?) or the stuff the Germans use instead of fresh milk in their coffee (bleuch) and () tea?

I guess you mean the REALLy thick gloopy stuff, in which case what I really like is our christmas biscuits called Toffee Bars. It's like not-quite-shortcake with a toffee-almond topping.

Somewhere around here a few weeks ago was a discussion about queso and how to make a proper queso and the key was using condensed milk. This allowed for a smooth texture while using REAL cheese as opposed to pasteurized process cheese food.


That's all I got. I've never used the stuff myself. My mother has made some delicious deserts that included it, but I wasn't paying that much attention when I was a kid.

I'd look for that thread, but with najnojpoho, It's undoubtedly lost in my convo list. Too many recent threads with so many similar nondescriptive names.

Easiest recipe in the world is the caramel chocolate slices. I made some for my fabulous new neighbours a couple of weeks ago and they're now my new best friends. I can't put their loveliness down to my personality. And before you start thinking the wrong thing, they're married to each other, and gay.

It was the basic butter crumb base, caramel layer, topped with chocolate.

I did try making the toffee sauce to spread between layers of a chocolate cake, but it was far too sweet I decided, so melted in lots of that very bitter chocolate (90%) which is impossible to enjoy as a bar, and that worked quite well. I just kept adding chocolate until it tasted okay. That was an epic cake. Not for the faint hearted.

You can get the toffee recipe easily off the web. Watch out for burning the milk at the bottom of the saucepan though.

They use this condensed milk in lots of things in the Canaries, including coffee. It's a sort of staple. I've a traditional recipe, involving a biscuit base,fresh pineapple and 'leche condensada'. Don't remember whether there was some alcohol to give it a kick. Someone else had made it. The biscuit crumbs were soaked in pineapple juice rather than having any butter, because that's not a common thing to use there at all.

I was trying to remember what I'd made recently using condensed milk: Millionaires Shortbread.

Yummy.

Ooh, millionaires shortbread That's definitely a possibility because I've got some decent chocolate in the pantry too.

If I remember rightly you can make a kind of dulce de leche by boiling a tin of condensed milk in water for an hour or two, and I've got a recipe for... dulce de leche Jaffa Cakes

It's translated from a French website (http://www.chefnini.com/pims-a-la-confiture-de-lait/ if you're interested):

For 15 small biscuits:

1 egg
20g sugar
1 pinch of salt
25g cornflour
1 pinch of bicarb
Dulce de leche
Approximately 100g of dark chocolate

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/gas mark 4.
2. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until the mixture becomes pale. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt. Fold into the previous mixture. Add the sifted cornstarch and bicarb. Mix again to get frothy.
3. Pipe the dough in tartlet molds and cook for 10-15 minutes.
4. Make a small indentation in the center of each cake with a knife handle. Allow to cool slightly in the pan, then unmold. Spread a small teaspoon of dulce de leche on top.
5. Melt the chocolate slowly in a bain marie. Place the cupcakes above.
10 - Make pour the melted chocolate and help you a spoon to distribute the chocolate throughout the pim's.
11 - Let the chocolate harden at room temperature (or refrigerate to go faster).
12 - I advise you to wait a few hours before eating to allow flavors to mingle.

I buy the European style condensed milk (not sweetened) that people do use in their coffee here. Neither of us EVER use milk in daily life so I use that for cooking & guests and have a carton of UHT milk for any guests who don't know to bring their own milk to our house!

I use the condensed milk rather than milk or cream in bechamel, cream sauces etc. Just made a gorgeous cauliflower & potato gratin with it tonight.

Not a huge baker as neither of us have a big sweet tooth but a proper school dinner caramel tart is always simple. (My Mum had her own catering business and school dinner desserts were ordered more often than fancy pastries and cakes for big parties and weddings!)

Make either a digestive biscuit or preferably short-crust base and blind bake. Boil a couple of tins of sweetened condensed milk for 2 hours and pour over base - chuck in fridge! Simple, sweet, great with custard.

isn't Key Lime Pie another one that's made with the really thick condensed milk?

One of the girls at my school used to buy a tin on Saturdays (the rest of us bought a slab of Bird's toffee) and used to sit in the TV room on Saturday evening watching Starskey and Hutch eating it with a spoon.

I think it's in banoffee as well?

They sell it in squeezy bottles on the in both normal and the dulce de leche. I have a late-middle aged friend who admitted she sneaked it out of the fridge and squirted it straight into her mouth.
I'm so going to have to make something this afternoon with the tin we have in stock here.

Bird's toffee. Blimey, I'd forgotten all about that

I think I'm with your friend, Sho. I like the idea of slowly working through a tin of condensed milk with a spoon, although I don't know if I could do a whole tin of it during the course of a Starsky and Hutch episode - might have to make that last over two weeks.

Y'know, Uncle Mort, Les and Carter used to put it in their tea in I Didn't Know You Cared whenever they made tea in Mort's railway carriage-shed. I don't think that's right.

Banoffee pie. That's not a bad idea. Organic bananas are incredibly cheap. And last night I was watching an old Hairy Bikers Mums Know Best episode. They featured something called a Manchester tart, which I must admit I'd never heard of despite having lived in Manchester for almost two years.

I wonder if a Manchester tart is the same as a Dorchester doxie, a Falmouth floozy, a Sheffield slapper or a Bolton brass

manchester tart! bleuch, we used to get that for pudding at my junior school. Basically just a jam tart with custard on top and coconut sprinkled over that.

Yeah, that sounds right, although one of the mums made it with bananas. Which is what reminded me of it. Dave said the proper way was to make it with jam. It sounds like a variation on the Bakewell tart.

I wonder if...

My husband is another straight-out-of-the-squeezy-bottle consumers. Tsk, no manners!

We used to have a great school cook, she was Polish, so I am certain that made the difference. Her pastry was divine and her tarts even more so. School custard for the manchester tart used to be made with full cream milk, but thickened until it nearly stands up by itself with full fat dried milk. Well in the days when I just started teaching it was. In those days poor kids who got free nursery places in deprived areas were so skinny we had to ensure they got actual good food in them. I'd never have imagined we'd end up with even poorer kids decades later, but who were obese.

Funnily, this school was not so very far from the place where Sho was eating awful pudding.

oh my awful pudding was in Windsor - that was my junior school we could see the castle from our playground

That's a very good point, Lanza. In the depression and during the war, when people didn't have the money to buy enough food, or when food was in short supply and rationed, people did what people have always done when they can't get enough nutrition or calories - they got skinny.

Now, there are people who are, to be fair, not as poor as those during the depression when my mum was a kid and might have only had bread and jam or bread and dripping for dinner, but who are poor and obese.

It's probably nothing to do with the food industry and processed/junk food though

Just to forestall the queso debate, it is important to use EVAPORATED milk, not condensed.

Condensed would produce a worrying effect.

B

I had thought that, but then, I know nothing about the food you're talking about. I did worry about the sugar...