Tablet is absolutely scrumptious and it is difficult to stop eating it - but I warn you, it is the kind of food that lasts one minute in your mouth and one year in your hips!
The recipe is from the Guardian (Jan 2014). You need:
- 125 g butter
- 350 gr condensed milk
- a pinch of salt
- 250 ml whole milk (we only had semi-skimmed milk so we used 225 ml milk and 25 ml of single cream)
- 1Kg caster sugar (yes, really)
- half a tsp of vanilla essence.
Melt the butter in a pan. Add the sugar, milk and salt and heat it all (stirring now and then) until the sugar has dissolved. This takes around 20 minutes. Then add the condensed milk and let it simmer (stirring also from time to time) for another 20 minutes (if you have a food thermometer this should reach 115 degrees). Take it off the heat, add the vanilla essence and beat with an electric whisker ( 2-3- minutes) or by hand (much better so that you start burning all those calories!) for 5-6 minutes. It should get the consistency of thick cream. Pour it into a shallow tin previously greased with butter. Let it cool down in the fridge for 30 minutes and cut it into squares when it has cooled down.
It is tricky to get the children to help with this as the mixture gets very hot. In any case, do not let them help you when you beat the mixture at the end as, though it looks like brown cream, it is boiling sugar (soft ball point) so they can burn themselves very easily.
