I didn't have enough of X so I used Y

I tried a new recipe out the other night - well I say I 'tried it out', what I actually did was: choose the recipe, buy half the ingredients and then bake something that pretty much resembles the original but isn't quite what it was meant  to be...

It's called 'Fruity Cardamon Flapjack Shortcake Tart' - I know, world's longest name right?! Basically imagine a shortbread and a flapjack had a little patisserie baby - got that image in your head? Cool.

So the original recipe requires:
115 g butter, melted and mixed with 1 tsp vanilla essence (so far, so good - I had all of that)
150 g dates and 50 g dried apricots, all finely chopped and cooked with the zest of an orange and 100 ml orange juice (this is where things started to go wrong as I didn't have an orange, but did have some rather wrinkly looking tangerines left over from Christmas - its amazing how long those bad boys last!).  You cook this for about a minute just to get the fruit plumped up.
Then you mix 4 oz wholemeal flour (well all I had was white flour) with 4 oz of oats (at this point I discovered I only had 3 oz of oats left, so topped up with ground almonds) and 3.5 oz of light brown sugar (I had 2 oz so topped it up with light muscovado sugar), 40 g of sunflower seeds, 40 g pumpkin seeds (I forgot to buy pumpkin seeds so used more sunflower seeds), 1/2tsp cinnamon and 1/2tsp cardamon - you guessed it, I didn't have cardamon either so in went a bit more cinnamon!  I apologise for suddenly switching to imperial measurements - even though I know you're not supposed to mix metric and imperial measurements, I always do as I'm terribly old fashioned and insist on weighing flour, sugar and butter in ounces - its the product of being a child of the 80's and learning the metric system but having a mother and granny who still used imperial!

Anyway, so you mix the butter in with the dry ingredients and make a fairly sticky shortbread-flapjack mix.

Half of this mix gets pressed into a 7", lined tart tin.  The fruity concoction goes on next and then the rest of the shortbread-flapjack mix. This gets baked for about 30-35 minutes until slightly golden.   You need to leave it to cool before cutting it into pieces. I cut this into 8 pieces and 1/8th is quite filling because of all the oats and seeds.

So here's the final baked version (minus a small bit that I cut out to taste to see if it was any good!)

I have to say, it really is lovely - it makes a great breakfast/brunch/elevenses snack.

Enjoy!
Miss Ellie xxx