Betty's millionaire shortbread

I'm trying out a couple of things. One of them is making millionaire shortbread; the other is weaning myself off Instagram.

The latter has gone rather well today (I've been using Aviary to do my pics instead) and the former is currently cooling in the fridge, so it might be slightly early to say whether it has been successful or not, but early indications are hopeful.

I was very kindly given this recipe by my boyfriend's grandma at the weekend, so this has been my first opportunity to try it out...

The shortbread was surprisingly easy to make - I just combined the flour, butter and sugar in a mixing bowl to form a nice dough, like so:

Once the dough is patted down in the baking tin, it's cooked for about twenty minutes, during which time, I had the exciting task of making the caramel filling.

Again, it's pretty straightforward to make, but includes a whole tin of condensed milk, so it's not exactly low-calorie baking! The condensed milk is heated with butter and sugar in a saucepan until it boils, then cooled again until it is much thicker and darker in colour. Once the shortbread base is cool, I poured the caramel over the top and left it to set.

The only component left to add was the all-important chocolate, made of - well, just chocolate. I melted it in a bain-marie (that's the posh cooking term for 'in heatproof bowl over simmering water'). This part of making the shortbread took the longest, but that's just because the caramel takes a long, long time to cool, and if you put the chocolate on before the caramel has cooled, they'll intermingle and you won't get that nice layered effect that millionaire shortbread ought to have.

So this is how the fully-assembled shortbread + caramel + chocolate looked while still cooling in its tin. The top is nice and glossy, although I've had to put it in the fridge for speedy-ish cooling, so it might lose that shine a bit, but it shouldn't detract from the taste.

And - finally! - here it is, the finished article, straight from the fridge. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, lookswise, at least. Now it just has to pass the taste test.

(: xx