Pistachio and Milk Chocolate Squares

HAPPY Diwali to myself! Since no festival is complete without something to sweeten the mouth, I got down to trying this interesting recipe that I stumbled upon on the BBC GoodFood website.

The link to the recipe is pasted below: www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1161643/pistachio-and-milk-chocolate-squares

Contrary to my imagination, the distinctive flavours of pistachios and chocolate made for a very happy marriage. These scrumptious squares (or diagonals and triangles as I have cut them), are indeed worth trying out.

Even if you don't have all the ingredients as specified, you can tweak the recipe a bit as I did:

For instance, if you don't have golden caster sugar, use plain white sugar, powdered. I thought of dribbling a tablespoon or two of black treacle to make up but then completely forgot about it. However, the lack of it didn't really make an appreciable difference I guess.

Next time, I must remember to first line up all the ingredients before beginning to mix.

Of the 200 gms chocolate in the recipe, 75 gms is for the cake batter, while 125 gms is for the topping. For the topping I used Amul dark chocolate, which is available in 500 gm slabs. For the cake batter, I used some chocolates that no one was eating because they didn't taste as delicious as their wrappers promised with all kinds of sweet somethings printed on them! And for good measure, they had come in a heart-shaped box. Good enough for cooking purposes though!

No self-raising flour? Just sift one teaspoon of baking powder with the plain flour. And instead of soured cream, I used plain fresh cream.

The overall result surpassed my own expectations.