In Dublin's Fair City

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Located down bustling Suffolk Street (and no the above photo is not Suffolk Street it’s the Ha’penny Bridge, Droichead na Leathphingine in Irish, and is the quintessential Dublin photograph to me) is a Dublin institution, the wonderful Avoca Cafe, certainly it is a well loved place by many, myself included.

I’ve eaten at the Avoca Cafe several times on my many trips to lovely city of Dublin but until recently had avoided buying the associated cookbooks, don’t ask me why because I really couldn’t tell you. Anyway I have both The Avoca Cookbook (Hugo Arnold & Georgia Glynn) and The Avoca Cookbook Book 2 (Hugo Arnold), both of which are wonderful books full of lovely recipes, stunning photography and great memory stirring writing.

The first sweet thing to be made from The Avoca Cookbook Book 2 (Hugo Arnold) was Wellington Square which is basically a shortbread base topped with caramel and topped again by chocolate.

After a lot of “umming” & “ahhing” I decided to top the slice with 70% dark chocolate. It was a great decision as the slightly bitter aftertaste of the chocolate really cut through the sweetness of the caramel. I think milk chocolate would just make this kind of slice rather sickly.

Another adjustment I think I’ll try the next time I make this (and it’ll be soon I hope) is to add some good quality salt to the caramel.  Salted caramel works so well in sweet dishes and I should imagine it would be good here too, only one way to find out though

I topped the slice with a little, well alright then quite a large beehive of clotted cream when I served this as a dessert. It wasn’t strictly needed as the Wellington slice itself is rather rich but nobody was complaining either so it couldn’t have been too bad a choice.

The Recipe:

For the base:

• 350g self raising flour
• 225g unsalted butter
• 110g caster sugar

For the filling:

• 225g caster sugar
• 225g unsalted butter
• 5 tablespoons golden syrup
• 397g (1 tin) condensed milk

For the topping:

• 340g chocolate (dark or milk).

1. Preheat the oven to 180C or the equivalent.
2. Rub the flour, butter and caster sugar together until it resembles breadcrumbs and press into a 25cm x 38cm x 4cm Swiss roll tin, bake for 20 minutes or until golden.
3. To make the filling melt the butter in a heavy based saucepan and add all the other ingredients, stir over a low heat for 40-50 minutes. It should be golden brown in colour when ready.
4. Pour over the pastry base and allow to cool.
5. Melt the chocolate and pour over the caramel.  Smooth over using a palette knife and cool before cutting in to squares.

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