Some of you might know Broken Biscuit Cake by its alternative name, Fridge Cake (or by its posh name, Tiffin), but whatever you call it you quite probably made it way back when you were at school. That’s when I first came across it, and it soon became a favourite to make when we had a few biscuits left over in the biscuit tin that didn’t seem to be getting eaten.

After my presentation yesterday, lots of people asked me how I made the cake, and whilst there’s a photo set on flickr with the instructions, I thought it would be nice to condense them all down into a little broken biscuit cake recipe here as well. So, here goes.

To make Broken Biscuit Cake, you’ll need the following (but don’t forget to hack it to make it nommy to your own tastes):

1. 250g biscuits. I like chocolate covered ones, but you can use anything. It’s good to have a mix of types and textures.
2. 300g milk chocolate.
3. 150g dark chocolate.
4. 100g unsalted butter.
5. 150g golden syrup.
6. 75g raisins.

And that’s all you need. Making the cake is as simple as combining the ingredients together like this (and it only takes about 20 minutes all told):

1. Put the biscuits in the sandwich bag, seal, and hit with a rolling pin until broken. It’s important to scream whilst you do this.

   Make sure the pieces are broken up nicely — you’ll want lots of crumbs and a few pieces about half the size of your finger nail. The crumbs are important to make sure that everything binds together later, and the larger pieces give you a little bit of extra texture in the finished cake.

   I find it’s a good idea to hit the bag on one side for a bit, then turn it over and try the other side too.

2. Break up 150g of the milk chocolate and all of the dark chocolate and place it into a mixing bowl. Chop the butter into pieces and add that to the bowl too. Finally, take the golden syrup (it’s about a third of a tin) and add that to the bowl too.

   Run the spoon you use to add the golden syrup under a hot tap first to heat it up and make the golden syrup slide right off it.

3. Whack the mixing bowl into your microwave on high for a minute or two. When it comes out the chocolate and butter will have started to melt and the golden syrup will have degenerated into a thin liquid. It won’t look particularly pleasant. That’s okay though.

4. Use a spoon to mix the chocolatey, buttery, syrupy mixture together. Just keep stirring it for a couple of minutes.

   Don’t stop once everything’s combined into a simple liquid though. If the mixture looks liquidy then you need to keep stirring. Once the mixture begins to come together and take on the consistency of a sloppy warm fudge then you’re done.

5. Pour the broken biscuit bits into the mix, along with the raisins. Mix everything together until you get a nice gooey chocolatey mess.

6. Grab a baking tray and cover it in clingfilm.

   Make sure you get the clingfilm as smooth as possible. If it’s a bit kinky then it’ll get trapped inside the cake and you’ll have difficulty getting it out when you come to take it out of the fridge later.

7. Place the cake mix into the baking tray.

   My advice here is to not dump it all into the tray in one go. Instead, try putting a few blobs of the mixture around the tray. The less you have to move around when you press it down in a minute, the less the clingfilm will get kinked up.

8. Once the cake mix is all in the baking tray, press it down with the back of the spoon. Make sure the cake is nice and compacted, and that it properly fills the tray.

9. Put the cake in the fridge. It would probably be sensible to cover it so that nothing else contaminates it.

10. Break up the remaining 150g of milk chocolate into a bowl, and melt it in the microwave as before.

11. Remove the cake from the fridge and pour your melted chocolate on top. Smooth it over the top to cover everything. You wouldn’t want to upset someone by giving them a slice that wasn’t covered in chocolate, would you?

12. Put the cake back in the fridge and walk away.

13. Let a couple of hours pass.

14. Turn out the cake. The clingfilm will be stuck to the bottom, so pull it off, making sure none is left behind.

    My technique for removing the clingfilm is to pull it vertically, rather than horizontally. I find this helps to stop it from tearing and leaving bits behind.

15. Cut the cake into little pieces. I find that each cake makes about 30-40 pieces, and that due to its density, a bit heavy knife is preferable for cutting it.

16. Put all the slices into a nice tub, and put that back in your fridge for nomming at your leisure. Reward yourself with a slice now.

    Due to the nature of this cake, I advise keeping it in the fridge. Chocolate, golden syrup and butter melt at low temperatures, and the cake gets pretty sticky if you leave it out in a warm place.

And that’s that — it’s all pretty easy really, and really tasty too. The scary part though, and probably something that everyone at Social Media Camp won’t want to hear is the number of calories this cake contains. An entire cake contains roughly 5800 calories, making each slice 145 calories of awesome chocolatey goodness.

Om nom nom.