I didn’t buy Mr SmartCookieSam an Easter Egg. Then again he didn’t buy me one. Not that I was bothered anyway. He told us not to buy him an egg a few weeks back as he didn’t need one. So I really hope he was joking yesterday morning when I put out the eggs and Easter treats I had bought for my two children.

I thought, well I didn’t buy him an Easter Egg so I’ll make him something else he likes. Last week I treated myself to Sarah Rainey’s new book Three Ingredient Baking. It’s a great book and has loads of recipes in there I’d love to try out. One recipe was for home made Bounty Bars. Now Mr SmartCookieSam loves Bounty Bars and if he ever fills up with diesel and fancies a bar of chocolate he always gets a Bounty Bar. I must admit I like them too.

The three ingredients in the homemade Bounty Bars were a tin of condensed milk, a whole 200g packet of dessicated coconut and 300g of dark chocolate.

I tipped the dessicated coconut into a bowl, then poured the tin of condensed milk over the top of it.

The condensed milk and the dessicated coconut were mixed together to make the creamy filling of the Bounty Bars. Then I put some cling film over the top of the bowl and put it into the fridge to harden up for a while. In Sarah Rainey’s recipe she says to chill them for 2 hours. I chilled them for about two and a half hours but I still thought the filling was a bit too soft and squishy. Maybe I should have tried the freezer instead?

After the chilling time I laid out some cling film on my work top and worked the coconut mixture into a large slab. This helped me to cut them into bars. I couldn’t get them into neat bars all the same size.

Definitely not neat and pristine but I hoped that a bit longer in the fridge being hardened in the bar shape would help them to be easier to work with. The bars were meant to stay in the fridge for another hour which I did. Unfortunately, an hour didn’t seem long enough and my fridge was working at the right temperature. I reckon I should have put them in the freezer.

Meanwhile, I melted 250g out of the 300g plain chocolate I had. I had to use two different types of dark chocolate but they were high in cocoa solids. Unlike real Bounty Bars, then! I used 200g of Morrisons The Best dark chocolate and then the rest of the chocolate was from a bar of Dr Oetker 72% cocoa solids dark cooking chocolate. It melts really well and I use it for many things.

The coconut bars were still very squishy and if I had had more time I would have put them in the freezer before adding the melted chocolate. I need one of those coating forks like chocolatiers have but instead I tried to use a normal fork and a teaspoon. This didn’t work! The coated bars went into the fridge to set as I melted the remaining 50g of dark chocolate. This was then decanted into a small piping bag with the end snipped off so I could drizzle the rest of the chocolate over the bars.

Be warned, this recipe is quite fiddly! I got into a big mess, especially when coating the bars with the melted chocolate and had to wash my hands several times in between. It didn’t help that I had the mother of all hot flushes as I was in the middle of this. Bad timing, or what?

When I put the bars in the fridge to set for the final time, my daughter came into the kitchen to start cooking the dinner for us. She burst out laughing and said they looked like giant dog turds! She was right, they did!

After we’d had our dinner which was actually a non-traditional Easter dinner made by my daughter of her special toad in the hole, I brought out the Bounty Bars (aka dog turds) to show Mr SmartCookieSam. The beauty of these is that my kids don’t like coconut so they won’t be pinching their dad’s chocolate. Despite their messy appearance they actually tasted delicious.

Will I make them again? I might, I might not. Time will tell.

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx