Pimp That Snack

Phat Finger

by Phil Vardey, John Warnes (+many friends) 8 photos Rated 83% 172 votes when voting closed

We’ve been a bit quiet since the m&m, but we’ve finally got round to
doing another pimp.
Id like to start by saying shortbread is a hell of a lot harder to bake than
youd think.
We decided to just go for out and out size with this one, so we chose
something we thought would be quite easy to do on a large scale and a
chocolate finger was an obvious choice.

We wanted to make it 6ft long, so bought a box of fingers and did some
precise measurements and scaling to see how much ingredients we needed.
Using a recipe found on some cooking site for shortbread, we headed off to
the biggest tesco in the area (we wanted asda, but our local is shut at the
moment 🙁 ). To say that walking around with a trolley load of flour, sugar,
soft spread and chocolate makes people look at you weird would be a bit of
an understatement.

Loading bags of flour and sugar from a supermarket checkout belt into a trolley

Car boot packed with cartons of butter and bags of flour in a supermarket car park

Once back in the kitchen we soon realised that mixing all this was going
to take a while, and that we needed reinforcements. Phoning as many people
as we could, telling them so bring their own bowls we soon had a few more
people who, with the exception of rachael, were completly useless.

Kitchen table covered with mixing bowls, flour, butter and a mound of pale dough

Mixing didn’t actually take as long as we expected and we where soon
shaping it into the finger. Once moulded we carefully cut it into 6 even
sections that would fit in an oven, then proceeded to commandeer peoples
ovens. The sections were in the ovens for at least 8 hours at gas mark 3.
During the backing process the sections dropped and sort of took their own
shape that was completely different to how they went in. They were then
placed on two separate planks of wood and trimmed as best we could back into
the original shape.

Two enormous logs of raw shortbread dough being shaped by hand across a table

Two huge baked shortbread slabs cooling in foil-lined tins on the worktop

Brown molten topping spread with a wooden spoon along the metre-long biscuit slab on foil

With the shortbread sort of looking right, we started melting all the
chocolate and pouring it over the top. The final thing was to trim the
excess form around the sides and generally try and pretty it up abit.

The finished chocolate-coated bar laid on paper, a normal chocolate finger beside it for scale

Giant bar cut in half showing pale shortbread inside, two standard chocolate fingers laid between

It’s not as perfect as we were hoping or expecting, but after a couple of
days, to say our enthusiasm was low would be a bit of understatement. and i
appologise to johns mum for the mess we made in her kitchen

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