Pimp That Snack
Language: English

Mars Bar

by Claire and James Hansell 8 photos Rated 74% 405 votes when voting closed

Ingredients:

30 normal-sized Mars bars

800g milk chocolate
400g brown demerera sugar
150ml water
20g butter
2 egg whites

Step 1: The usual chocolate melting malarkey. Pour a thinnish layer into the tin and whack it into the fridge.

A thick layer of melted chocolate set in a baking-paper-lined loaf tin

Step 2: Make the caramel. This can (and did many times) end in tears of brittle burnt toffee, even though all it takes is heating the sugar, water and butter – fellow snack-pimpers beware of heating it too long! Alternatively, the thinking person’s solution would probably be to buy some toffees and melt them, but we wanted this pimp to be effort-filled.

Dark glossy caramel being stirred with a spoon in a metal bowl held in two hands

Step 3: Allow the caramel to cool and pour onto the chocolate. Re-fridge it.

Caramel poured from a pan onto the set chocolate base in the lined tin

Step 4: We ummmed and ahhed for a long time about how best to get the nougaty goodness of the Mars just right, and in the end decided that the only way to do it was to sacrifice many of PimpMars’ smaller cousins on the altar of pimpingness. So, we carefully sliced away the chocolate and caramel from 30 (well, 28 and a half…) Mars bars and melted the creamy nougat found inside. This meant that it was no longer very light and fluffy, but rather akin to some kind of glue, so we beat in 2 egg whites to try and restore the balance. This in fact didn’t really work and ended up not looking at all like the stuff in the middle of a Mars bar. Then it went back into the fridge.

Hands chopping normal Mars bars on a board, two bowls of pieces and wrappers alongside

A thick rope of pale nougat poured from a bowl onto the caramel layer in the tin

Step 5: More chocolate for the base. Fridge.

Step 6: Turn out the almost-ready mother of all snacks, melt some more chocolate and cover the sides with calories. This was fraught with danger in the form of several nougat-quakes as the egg whites had had the effect of making the nougat rather runny, but with a bit of persistance the sides were covered and shored up by shoving the creature against the side of its dish.

The assembled slab coated in melted chocolate in a white dish, a mug beside it for scale

A short while later… beautiful. Apart from the fact that it has the stability of quicksand, the nougat layer looks nothing like it should (but tastes just right) and that we got so carried away with making the swirls on the top of it that the top layer of chocolate ended up about an inch thick, it looks just like its smaller friend.

The chocolate-coated giant bar on a chequered board, a normal Mars bar dwarfed beside it

And as well as the huuuuge slab of calories that is the giant Mars, we also have the shells of 30-odd Mars bars to eat – probably enough to feed a family for a month, or power a small village for a week…

The giant bar cut open showing nougat and caramel layers, a normal Mars bar cut alongside

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