Chocolate Fridge Cake for the Royal Wedding

Unless you have been living in total isolation from the media for the last six months, you will know that Prince William and Catherine Middleton will marry tomorrow in Westminster Abbey.  Ensconced as I am Down Under, I have not seen any of the Royal Wedding tat that is readily available in England, although I have a friend in London who is purchasing some and posting her finds on Facebook.

However, I could not avoid the coverage of the finer details of the Royal Wedding, including that in addition to the traditional wedding cake, Prince William is having a groom's cake in the form of a chocolate fridge cake.  He has commissioned McVities, makers of the key ingredient of rich tea biscuits, to make this cake (the other one is being made by Fiona Cairns), as it has fond childhood memories for him.

A chocolate fridge cake is roughly a concoction of chocolate, biscuits, nuts and fruit.  Depending on which recipe you use, it contains golden syrup or condensed milk, glace cherries or raisins or both, dark or milk chocolate or a mixture of both, and nuts - or not.  There are a trillion different recipes online, all claiming to be "the" recipe.  

I wanted to make a chocolate fridge cake as my tribute to William and Catherine, so I threw my hat into the ring with a recipe I found here in The Daily Mail. This one contains condensed milk and is non-specific about the type of chocolate.  I used Paradise Rich Tea Biscuits, the McVities version being frightfully expensive here and only available from The British Shop.  They are not the same as McVities because they contain currants, but I thought that this would boost the dried fruit content of the cake.  I also soaked my raisins for half an hour in a tablespoon of Cointreau to plump them up and add a tinge of orange flavour to the cake.  As I didn't have glace cherries, I left them out, and chose walnuts as the nuts for this cake.

A word of warning about this recipe - it did not set up particularly well, and the crisp layer of additional chocolate on top made the soft under-layer especially hard to cut.  I used dairy spread instead of butter (because the recipe indicated that margarine was OK) - perhaps this had something to do with it.  However, to be on the safe side, I recommend placing a layer of unbroken (preferably square or rectangular) biscuits in the bottom of the pan and layering the rest on top so that there is a solid base for your fridge cake.

I have tried a square of the not-quite-set cake, and can say with certainty that it tastes like you'd expect - very sweet, candy bar-like, slightly crunchy and very good in a childlike way.

I am not quite sure whether I will watch the wedding yet - I love a good frock, but I don't have to watch the whole wedding to see Catherine's dress. Will you be watching the wedding?