Delicious Florentines

These are a favourite festive delight, that will quickly be devoured at any time in our household. The combination of dried fruits, cherries, cornflakes and rich, dark chocolate, all held together by sweetened condensed milk is magic to the taste buds.

We made these as Christmas gifts for Sophie’s Kindi teachers (but didn’t have time for the chocolate to set properly when they were wrapped – so they would have been tasty, but messy!).

We also made them for the adults at Sophie’s Birthday party and they went down a treat. We melted cooking chocolate, instead of regular dark chocolate, in a bowl, over a saucepan of boiling water, instead of in the pan, second time round.

We also discovered that it really is better to spoon out no more than a tablespoon of the florentine mixture onto the baking tray – so that the ingredients really bind and set together and are easily manageable to smooth the chocolate onto the base once cooled.

If you’d like the recipe here it is…

2 cups (60g) cornflakes

1/2 cup (80g) sultanas

1/4 cup (35g) dried currants

1/4 cup (60g) chopped red glace cherries

1/4 cup (60g) chopped green glace cherries (we couldn’t find green, so doubled up on the red)

3/4 cup (105g) slivered almonds

3/4 cup (180ml) sweetened condensed milk

200g dark chocolate, melted

Combine cornflakes, fruit, nuts and condensed milk in a large bowl; mix well.

Drop level tablespoons of mixture about 4cm apart on oven trays covered with baking paper (in this photo we put more than a tablespoon and found the florentines hard to stay together when we came to spreading the chocolate – second time around we followed the instructions to the letter and had much better success!).