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Alpimpi

Rated 83.48%
69 votes

I hear plenty of calls to pimp the well-loved ThorntonÂ’s chocolate, so after several months of research we present the thing of beauty!!

Close examination of the tasty, high-calorie treat reveals its inner secrets: the filling is in a round shape, meaning that the Alpini is made by extruding the semi-solid praline filling (i.e. pushing it a high pressure through a shaper. You may have a small version of this machine if you played with Play-doh.), cutting it into bite-size or bar-length chunks, then coating in chocolate.

We do not have this kind of high-tech conveyor belt machinery, so we have to make do withÂ…a loaf tin. ThatÂ’s approx 400%, right there.

According to the nice lady at said delicious choccy shop, the recipe for the inside of an Alpini is top-secret, and IÂ’d certainly agree with that because it was so hard to find!! For months on end I scoured the web and could only come up with some stupid American caramel candy thing. Bleurgh. It was almost a lost cause and the Alpini would remain forever unpimpedÂ…until I found something interesting in a French supermarket.

PRALINE POWDER!!!!

It is a mix of ground hazelnuts, ground almonds and caramel, and it had a recipe on the back. After a bit of head-scratching, translation and long chats we decided to not go that wayÂ…as well as probably being completely the wrong texture, the multiples of egg yolk and white also went uncooked and it might be quite the poisonous pimp. So first of all we got some chocolate, double cream and chopped almonds (of course saving the delicious powder for the real thing!!) and began experimenting.

I’m sure you can see what we thought it looked like for yourself. Our first attempt went surprisingly well – four squares to 35ml cream and a sprinkle of nuts, and a capful of vanilla essence. I liked it though I thought something was definitely missing, though it was proclaimed both as ‘too sweet’ and ‘not sweet enough’ by others. The texture in the end was too gloopy, where an Alpini is kind of crumbly, and apparently all the nuts had settled to the bottom.

Our second attempt was MUUUCH better. We whipped it up in the blender, this time using decent chocolate – 2 rows of it to 40ml cream, enough nuts to cover the surface of the melted goo in the blender and dividing the vanilla in half between essence and vanilla sugar. A blind taste test revealed, apart from the difference in texture, that we had pretty much got our semblance!!

So, with the filling perfected-ish, it was time to make the shell!! Whilst listening to Kazakhstan dance music we set out all the stuff and began lining the tin, first with grease and then with greaseproof paper. Alice’s mum had suggested cutting the paper into strips – a thin one for the lengthways, then some sort of bowtie-shape for the widthways, meaning the tin’s corners are covered.

Of course, it was only AFTER the chocolate – real expensive Belgian chocolate that Emma had got hold of!! – was slopped in did we realise that, hmm, maybe the paper needs taping down. We planned to cover the bottom with about ½ inch of chocolate, and the sides with ¼. So over the course of the next week, whenever we had a spare evening we came into the kitchen to slop on another layer or two. In the end we had six layers, and the thing looked gorgeous in itself.

So it was filling time!! A bar of Belgian and two rows of CadburyÂ’s (to make up the eight rows we needed) was melted in the mic, and 150ml of fresh gloopy double cream was slopped in.

And mixed up. With 1½ capfuls of vanilla essence, and a couple of spoonfuls of vanilla sugar. ItÂ’s great stuff and you can make your own by sticking a couple of vanilla pods in a jar with some caster sugar and leaving it for six months. Time for the blender again, and we FINALLY opened the Vahine praline powder…

…and after a bit of blender-wrangling with spoons we mixed up the beauty and spooned it into the case.

The next day we melted YET ANOTHER bar of chocolate and made the base!! Only two layers this time; we needed it for tomorrow to bring up to feed hungry nerds, so we also found a suitable tray.

Less than half an hour after the second base coat we decided it was solid enough to turn out, and turn out we did. The paper took a little peeling to get off, but we had a solid cuboid of chocolate and calories – the behemoth weighs no less than 2¼ pounds, compared to a titchy 2-3 grams of the original. We used the remnants of today’s chocolate bar to patch the corners up a little and to draw the gouges found in the top of every Alpini sweet. Gotta love those gouges.

Finally we dusted icing sugar on it to have that Alpine mountain snow-covered look that the packaging boasts. If Alpini is the Alps then this is Olympus Mons. It was harder than it looks to get the small amount on the sides – the pastry brush was wet and the thing melted when you touched it!!

We brought it up on its tray to unveil to our gaming group, complete with sign…

We had a look at the inside and it registered as wonderful in all five senses.

I suggest using a hacksaw to get through those layers of chocolate, but having a quarter slice was that little piece of heaven. Even though by the end of the day the behemoth weÂ’d spent all week on was nestling in about twenty very happy peopleÂ’s stomachs.

So, to review…I don’t think we would have got this taste if it weren’t for the praline powder. The fact the nuts were caramelised really added something nice to it. But it still missed something special that’s in the originals – we racked our brains but couldn’t think of it at all…oh well.

Statistics: We used a grand total of eleven bars of chocolate – one 250g and the rest 200g, all but the big one being Belgian chocolate. It weighed 2¼ pounds and its dimensions were 7½ inches long, 2¼ deep and 2¾ wide. (Yeah, I like Imperial.) Please don’t ask us what the calorie count was; we truly don’t wanna know…suffice to say that a normal Alpini is about seventy calories and this thing is about 400%.

As for pricing:
(Note: this includes the stuff we used for testing and gobbling, tooÂ…)
Normal Belgian chocolate – 69p, x8
Emma’s expensive Belgian chocolate – 80p x2
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk – £1.20ish
Pot of fresh double cream – 75p x2
Vanilla essence – mum-bought, probably just over a pound
Vanilla sugar – make it yourself
Vahine Praline mix – €1.20 (about…80p?)

Total: £11.92, approx.

So essentially this was a surprisingly cheap pimp for the price of the originals (£3.00 odd?!?), it just had looooots of chocolate that added up.

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