Auntie Bet's Coconut Ice

 Another firm favourite at Christmas. For several years as a teenager I cooked up batches of sweets for Christmas - fudge, Turkish Delight, Rice Krispie cakes (are they sweets or biscuits or cake? The Jaffa Cake conundrum comes to mind) and Auntie Bet's Coconut Ice.

Auntie Bet was one of my Mum's maternal aunts. Nanna & Auntie Bet were close and only lived a couple of streets away. When I lived with my grandparents for a while (a story for another recipe), Nanna & I sometimes would go round to Auntie Bet's & Uncle Billy's on a Saturday. Nanna & Auntie Bet would chat over a cup of tea in the kitchen and I would sit in the middle room (front room was always only for best) and watch The Harlem Globetrotters on the TV. I'm not sure why, but Uncle Billy was a big Globetrotters fan. Anyway, I digress. Auntie Bet was a good cook. Made lovely cakes, I remember. 

And somehow a few years later I acquired Auntie Bet's Coconut Ice recipe. It really was the best I'd ever eaten, diabetese-inducing sweet, but also soft and moist and crumbly. 

This weekend I made it again for the first time in decades. It really is incredibly sweet, as it should be.

So here is the recipe with measurements in Imperial. Nanna didn't like decimal, so I'll assume that Auntie Bet would have been of a similar mind.

2lbs sugar
12oz dessicated coconut
1 cup of milk

Put the sugar & milk in a saucepan and leave in a warm place for 12 hours.
Bring to the boil gently, then gradually add the coconut and beat well. Spoon into a greaseproof paper lined tray (about 8x8" square) and press down. Leave to cool, then cut into squares. I always used to put a layer of half the mixture into the tray, colour the remaining mixture with a little red food colouring and then layer that over the white.

And as a bonus, here's a picture of (left to right) Uncle Billy, Auntie Bet, Poppa & Nanna out on a jolly together.

Date Slices

This is the first recipe I've tried from my Mum's recipe notebook. It appears it was given to her by Maureen Kelly, who I think was a friend when we lived in Uganda, but I might be mistaken. 

For some reason Mum only made this at Christmas time. Maybe it was the dates and the pinch of ginger. It certainly couldn't have been that it was any trouble to make and it is delicious. 

I made this just before this Christmas and it brought back memories of my teenage years - the Boxing Day spread of cold turkey and tinned ham, sticks of celery in the glass vase with handles that looked like a strange sort of flower arranging trophy, and my Nanna's piccalilli. Christmas cake with the teeth-breaking spiky icing and decorated with a plastic Santa on a sled, the bristly Christmas tree and a foil 'Merry Christmas'. And date slices served with lots of single cream (out of a jug and not the tinned variety either).
And after all these years it's still as good. That sweet, fudgy date mixture between crumbly, oatiness. Great with lots of single cream to moisten the crumble, though I expect a big dollop of clotted cream would work equally well. Enjoy!

250g chopped dates

180g brown sugar

pinch of ginger

250ml water

210g self raising flour

150g rolled oats

115g butter or margarine

pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 190C (170C fan)

Place the dates, sugar, ginger & water in a small pan and simmer until smooth. Set aside to cool.

Sieve the flour & salt and rub in the fat, then add the oats. Put half the crumbs into a greased tin (I use one roughly 10x7") and press down flat. Spread over the date mixture, then top with the remaining crumbs. Bake in the oven  for half an hour.

Cut into squares and leave in the tin until cold.
Enjoy!