Sticky Toffee Pudding Icecream with Brandy Snaps

I love icecream. I love trying new flavours. One the highlights of our trip last year to Japan was the opportunity to try matcha (green tea), sweet potato, black sesame seed, and sake icecreams. The first icecream of summer is an event of great ceremonial celebration; and if it occurs on an unseasonably glorious day in March, then so much the better. And, isn’t just amazing how at the end of a large meal, a scoop or two of icecream still manages to slither down the hatch…

Inspired by a fabulous idea dreamt up by Rob at Hungry in Hogtown for entry in the recent St. George’s day English pudding event, I just had to make a batch of sticky toffee pudding icecream to try for myself.

Sticky toffee pudding, as Rob discovered, is not a English pudding of great antiquity, but it is a dessert that is well known across the country, and one that features on the menus of eateries from homely hostelries to hoity-toity hotels. I think it deserves the accolade of 'modern classic', and is undoubtably a recipe that will have great longevity. It has an association with the Lake District, as the recipe apparently originated from the kitchens of The Sharrow Bay Hotel, that stands on the shores of Lake Ullswater, Penrith, Cumbria. The hotel was established in 1948 by the late Francis Coulson and Brian Sack. Francis was by all accounts a bit of a genius in the kitchen. He devised the recipe (originally called 'icky-sticky toffee sponge) back in the early 1970s. He was never precious about the recipe, and passed it on to whoever asked for it. However, there does appear to be a rival claim for the pudding from another Cumbrian hotel; the chef of which set up Cartmel Village Shop, in the small town of Cartmel to produce and sell the puddings commercially. If you live in the UK, then you will probably have seen Cartmel Sticky Toffee Puddings in your local supermarket. They are very good indeed.


On a cruise around Waitrose I discovered that Cartmel Village Shop also produce a Sticky Toffee Sauce. Made with only sugar, cream, butter and vanilla essence, it tastes as naughty as you might expect. Keep it out of sight, to try and keep it out of mind.

For the purposes of this recipe I bought two Marks and Spencer Sticky Toffee Puddings, as it would have been too distressing to mulch up a Cartmel pudding, and too much effort to make my own simply to use as an icecream base. The M&S puddings come in packs of two individual servings, and the quantity was pretty spot on for Rob's recipe.


A couple of notes on the making of the icecream - I took the instruction to caramelise the pudding to mean simply heating the broken pudding in its own sugary sauce. I did this over a pretty low heat for about 5-8 minutes. I added the sugar with the milk and cream (think Rob forgot to mention this). The resulting icecream had a intense flavour, but I think (for my tastes) could have benefited from a reduction in the amount of molasses used. The treacley taste was a little overwhelming. However, that aside this was a luxuriant creamy take on an already top-tip pudding.

To set off the smoothly dense icecream I decided make some brandy snaps. Brandy snaps are a form of thin, crunchy, sticky and slightly chewy ginger biscuit, made and consumed across the country. Historically they have come in differing forms, but now they are generally rolled into a tube shape when still warm. The cooled tube can then be filled with cream to serve.

Laura Mason and Dorothy Hartley both classify brandy snaps as wafers - which are thin biscuits made in a wafering iron, with heat applied to top and bottom surfaces of the biscuit. (Click here to see some historical wafers). Mason suggests that wafers (as sweet biscuits) developed from the plain wafers produced in Catholic countries for use celebrating the Eucharist. Now, it seems to me that there is quite a long journey to be made from Communion wafer to brandy snap, so I'll take Ms. Mason's word for this. Alan Davidson in the 'Oxford Companion to Food' describes the biscuits as, 'crisp, lacy baked items which stand on the frontier between biscuits, wafers and sugar confectionery.'


To me this sounds a better summation of what brandy snaps are; I can find no recipe that requires wafer tongs to cook them, instead they are oven baked on a metal sheet. I think that they could be successfully made on a flat griddle, which is perhaps closer to the cooking method used for wafers.

Brandy snaps were sold in Britain as another form of fairing (gingered biscuits were a big winner at country fairs it seems), and they came in many shapes and could be made with sugar, honey or treacle, and from the 1880s - golden syrup. Not all recipes include brandy - it seems that the flavour is not really discernable, so to make cheaper batches of snaps it was left out. Some recipes skip out the ginger too, relying solely on the cooked sugar and butter for flavouring. Don't worry, there will be none of that abstinence in this household. The recipe I followed from Jane Grigson's 'English Food' uses both brandy and ginger, and golden syrup lends its deliciously sticky presence to form the basis of the snap.

Brandy Snaps
(quantities given here make 20-30 biscuits - I used half quantities)

125g butter
125g golden syrup
125g granulated sugar
Pinch salt
125g plain flour
2 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of lemon juice
2 teaspoons of brandy

1. Preheat oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Prepare a couple of baking sheets with greaseproof paper.
2. Melt the butter, syrup and sugar in a pan over a low heat. Keep stirring, and once the sugar has dissolved take pan off the heat. Leave the mixture to cool.
3. As soon as the mixture is tepid, add the salt, flour, ginger, lemon and brandy. Mix well.
4. Measure out the mixture using teaspoons. You will need to space the dollops out well, so aim for 6 per baking sheet (you can always do a second batch - I did).
5. Jane suggests baking for 8-10 minutes, but I found this too long and the snaps burnt. By my third go I snatched the baking sheet from the oven immediately as a nice deep golden had been achieved.
6. You can shape the snaps round wooden spoon handles, or a rolling pin, and drape them over the base of a glass to form a basket. Be ready to start shaping not long after the biscuits come out of the oven. They might appear too soft, but as soon as you start to work them the mixture seems to magically harden. Hours of fun.


The brandy snaps went well with the sticky toffee icecream, but I had another batch of icecream in the freezer, also freshly churned this weekend -rhubarb ripple icecream (from an old recipe from Sainsbury's Magazine). I felt a bit mean excluding it from the chance of a moment of glory, so I popped a couple of scoops into the only brandy snap basket that I had managed to make, and stuck in a fan of broken snap.


Who needs crockery? I think that there could be a large market for edible tableware...

Tunbridge Wells Wafers (or Romary Biscuits)

The family bakery of Alfred Romary was responsible for the wafer biscuit exported from the Kent spa town of Tunbridge Wells (Royal Tunbridge Wells, if you please) and sent out to Macy’s of New York, food stores in Belgium and Paris, and up to London for sale in Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, Morel Bros. Cobbett & Son Ltd., and Jacksons of Piccadilly - all purveyors of fine foods. Queen Victoria visited Alfred’s shop just before Christmas 1876, and liked the wafers so much that she granted the company a Warrant of Appointment to Her Majesty, and subsequent monarchs continued the custom - high praise indeed. Framed letters proudly displayed on the shop walls were orders for biscuits from the Queens of Yugoslavia, Spain and Romania. Tunbridge Wells Wafers were clearly enjoyed by discerning women of grand quality – do all Queens like a biscuit with a cup of tea?

Alfred Romary set up in business in 1862 at 26 Church Road, Tunbridge Wells. Initially he was classified as a ‘Water cake maker’, but it was his wafers that made his name famous around the globe. In 1926 A. Romary & Co. became a limited company when W. A. P. Lane bought it. According to Dorothy Hartley in ‘Good Things in England’ the company was sold onto Freeman’s Norwich Hollow Biscuits prior to 1932, the year her book was published. I could find no corroboration of this in the other material I read, but Romary’s did at some stage start making and selling Freeman’s Norwich Hollow biscuits (a type of rusk). In 1935 Rowntree purchased the company and built a new factory in Tunbridge Wells, although some baking continued to be carried out at Romary’s bakery in Church Road. Rowntree stopped making the Tunbridge Wells Wafers locally in 1957, a result of wartime and post-war rationing. However, in 1963 production restarted at Rowntree’s factory in Glasgow (because the Queen liked the biscuits, apparently), and continued until 1981. A final batch of biscuits was made for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Rowntree was acquired by Nestle in 1988, so the Tunbridge Wells Wafers original recipe must lie deep in the archives of this Goliath.

What made Tunbridge Wells Wafers so good that they met with royal approval? (Maybe Duchy Originals should pick up the baton and manufacture them now.) Romary’s themselves described the biscuits in a trade advertisement: ‘As thin as lace, of a flavour so delicate as to be indefinable. The clubs serve them with port, but they are also excellent with ices or at afternoon tea. Many people prefer them to sweets and chocolate. In two flavours, Sweet and Ginger.’ ‘Good Things in England’ (1932) says of Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers: ‘There are Ginger wafers, Royal wafers, water biscuits, Old English stone-ground wheaten wafer biscuits, etc., all unique and delicate eating, quite different from the ordinary biscuits however good; and distinctively English.’ Mary Ann Pike writing in ‘Town & Country, Fare & Fable’ (1978) states; ‘The wafers are about 3 inches in diameter, very delicate and lacy, and are good with cheese as well as wine.’

Wafer biscuits can be cooked by heating the raw mixture between two metal plates (think thin waffles), but Romary’s cooked their biscuits on metal trays in ovens. The paste was rolled to wafer thinness by hand, and continued to be so even after Rowntree introduced mechanisation. A spiked roller was used to make the perforations so the biscuits could be made rapidly, and quickly sent to the oven for baking. The booklet I obtained from Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery says that ‘trap ovens’ were used. Does anyone know what a trap oven is?

Although Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers were a proprietary recipe, I found on my bookshelves not one, but two possible recipes for the biscuits (and thereby proving the point that, yes, I did need to buy that book). The first is a recipe titled ‘Tunbridge Wells Cakes’, in Dorothy Gladys Spicer’s collection ‘From an English Oven’ (1948). However on closer examination her recipe is for a shortbread type biscuit flavoured with caraway seeds. It looked as if it would produce a biscuit similar to the Shrewsbury Cakes I have recently posted about, and I was pretty certain that this is not what Romary’s famous wafers would have been like. I subsequently came across another recipe for Tunbridge [Wells] Cakes on the internet - this on a site relating to the era of Jane Austen (see no. 29) - the recipe (sourced from one of two cookbooks written between 1749 and 1796) is identical to the one in ‘From an English Oven’, and predates Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers by 100 years. It would be interesting to learn more about this older biscuit – perhaps they were enjoyed by genteel Regency visitors attending the Spa?

The second recipe looked closer to the mark, as this was quite different in terms of method and ingredients and I reckoned it would produce a biscuit not too far removed from the brandy snap - so definitely a contender for the description ‘delicate and lacey’. This latter recipe is in Section IV (‘Cereals’) of Andre Simon’s ‘Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ (published by The Wine and Food Society in 1945), the recipe is ascribed to Doris Lytton Toye, who wrote for Vogue magazine at that time. I decided to go with this recipe, but I would love to hear from anyone with an ‘authentic’ recipe. I baked once, and then had to refine the recipe and instructions as my first batch of biscuits was not a happy one. Ingredients and method are my revised versions:

Tunbridge Wells Wafers

150g plain flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
55g treacle (I had to decide whether this meant black treacle or golden syrup, as the term ‘treacle’ has in the past been used for both substances. I went with golden syrup as I felt that black treacle biscuits would be more of an acquired taste and golden syrup more of a crowd-pleaser, but please feel freee to try black treacle if that tickles your tastebuds.)
55g butter
55g caster sugar or soft brown sugar

1. Preheat oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2 (D. L. T. suggests cooking in a ‘very moderate oven’, so this is my approximation of that instruction – we have a fan oven).
2. Prepare two baking sheets by lining with greaseproof paper.
3. In a medium sized saucepan melt the butter, treacle and sugar. Don’t allow the mixture to become too hot - as soon as the ingredients have blended remove from the heat.
4. Sift the flour, baking powder and ginger into a bowl. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the warmed mixture, stirring to combine after every spoonful and mix to a paste. D. L. T. recommends that it is easier to handle the paste if it is used while still warm.
5. Divide into three portions. On a floured surface roll out each portion as thinly as you can. I found that the best way to work was to roll the dough out directly onto the baking sheet, use my 3 inch metal cutter to mark out the biscuits, and then to remove the surplus dough. This meant that I didn't have to try and move very thin pieces of dough.
6. Bake for about 10 minutes.
7. Allow to cool for a few minutes only, before transferring to a wire rack.

Doris Lytton Toye states that wafers are the ‘thinnest and lightest of biscuits’, but I have to tell you that initially this recipe produced a biscuit with neither of these qualities. The liquid and the dry elements of the dough did not marry well, the mixture appeared too dry and was impossible to form into a smooth paste.


I decided to add a little milk to bind the dough, which helped, but I struggled to roll the dough out as the mix continued to crumble apart. In the end I managed to use my rolling pin to both compress and roll enough of the dough to form a dozen biscuits, but there was no way of rolling to wafer thinness. The resulting ‘wafer’ was crisp to the point of hard, and although the flavour was not bad, it couldn’t make up for the tooth-snapping texture.


Compared to the brandy snap recipe I previously cooked (successfully), that uses a similar method of melting together sugar, syrup and butter, the proportion of flour seemed very high. Was the recipe in error, or was there a flaw in my technique? I had a look at a few brandy snap recipes, and I noticed that they instructed that you add the dry ingredients to the wet, whereas the recipe in 'Cereals' the contrary was the case. By working a spoonful of flour at a time into the warmed butter, treacle and sugar mixture I was able to form a smooth paste, and stop adding flour once the correct consistency had been acheived - this meant I had about 25g of flour left over - the 150g in the ingredient list above is my adjusted amount.


My adjusted recipe produced a far lighter biscuit, which still had a degree of rigidity, but in a thinner biscuit this translated into 'snap', or a delicate brittleness. The biscuits had a good tangy gingeryness. Look at how the light travels through my second wafer, compared to the sunlight neutralising first version. Now which do you think her majesty would prefer - and which would go to the corgis?



With thanks to Ian Beavis at Tunbridge Well’s Museum and Art Gallery, Karen Tayler at Tunbridge Wells Library, and ‘Anke’ at www.anke.blogs.com, all of who helped with information. Tunbridge Wells Museum sell a booklet entitled ‘Tunbridge Wells Biscuits – The Story of Romary’s’ – yours for £2.25 – please contact the museum to purchase a copy.

Sedgemoor Easter Cakes, Somerset

Easter biscuits are made across Britain and are so ubiquitous that Marks & Spencer sell them as part of their seasonal fare (see below). Traditionally they are served after church on Easter Sunday, and are presented in a bundle of three biscuits to represent the Holy Trinity. They are eaten alongside hot cross buns, simnel cake and copious quantities of chocolate eggs as part of our Easter festivities. The feasting comes at the end of Lent, so the taste of rich foods is supposed to come as a treat. Similar biscuits eaten before Lent commences are known as Lenten biscuits, and are made to use up eggs, sugar etc. in the way that the Shrove Tuesday pancake does.

The West Country (from Gloucestershire, Avon, Wiltshire and Dorset westwards) has an association with Easter biscuit recipes, but my reading turned up more country-wide variations than there are days in Lent, so I think that this is one of those recipes with a central 'theme', but for which there are unlimited variations. The theme is spice and fruit. All Easter biscuits are spiced, either through a small addition of mixed spice or ground cinnamon. The fruit is either solely currants, or can be currants with a little mixed peel. Some recipes use grated lemon zest for extra zing. Biscuits made commercially may have oil of cassia added. Cassia is a part of the same (laurel) family as the cinnamon that you can pick up in the supermarket. It has a similar but stronger and more bitter flavour. An Bristol educated, Australian resident writes of making Easter biscuits at catering college in Bristol, that had oil of cassia as a flavouring. A quick scout around the net reveals it to be an ingredient you can pick up through retailers that stock essential oils etc. (should you wish to try it). I also found one commercial bakery that uses it as a flavouring, and proclaims the fact.

My recipe is from 'Good Things in England', edited by Florence White. This book first published in 1932 was in Florence's words, '...an attempt to capture the charm of England's cookery before it is completely crushed out of existence.' The book documents in recipe form traditional and regional dishes from all corners of the country. A similar study was made of Scottish food by F. Marian NcNeill in 1929 (I have yet to learn of a similar text covering Welsh food).

The post-war years encouraged a certain amount of introspection and a re-evaluation of English culture, but were also a forward looking age, and a generation that saw foreign culture as something to be experimented with and explored. Florence White did not seek to exclude the modern, but wished to record the riches of England's larder, and to talk with the people who were still preparing dishes with ancient credentials, and to ensure that such recipes were documented for future generations (such as ours - Florence, this posting is for you). The flypiece to the book reads, 'A Practical Cookery Book for Everyday Use. Containing Traditional and Regional Recipes suited to Modern Tastes contributed by English Men and Women between 1399 and 1932.'

Florence White set up the English Folk Association in 1931, and in the January of that year was held the first English Folk Cookery Exhibition in Kensington, London. My recipe for Easter biscuits was supplied for this exhibition by Mrs. Wyatt of Huish Episcopi, Somerset. Sedgemoor is a coastal region of Somerset, firmly in the 'West Country'.

Sedgemoor Easter Cakes (yep, biscuits can also be cakes)

225g plain flour
110g butter
110g caster sugar
110g currants
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg
2 tbsp brandy

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Prepare two baking sheets.
2. Rub the butter into the flour.
3. Add the sugar, currants, spice and the cinnamon.
4. Beat the egg and mix with the brandy - add to the dry ingredients ands stir until well incorporated.
5. Roll out about 1/2 inch/1cm thick, and cut into rounds.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

There was no instruction to glaze with egg white and sprinkle with sugar, which most other recipes suggested. I thought that by doing so the finished biscuits might have looked a bit more appetising. They tasted rather fine, but the surface of them was very matt and had large dimples. However, on a closer examination of Marks & Spencer's efforts, I saw that their biscuits were identical in colour, also had large dimples, and although were speckled with sugar grains were equally matt. A taste test (tough job, but someone needs to address these things) revealed a bisuit with a drier consistency than mine, and more snap. The main flavour to my taste buds appeared to be aniseed with a hint of caramel. All in all they were no better, no worse, simply different (oh, alright then. My biscuits beat M&S's by a Easter bunny's whisker, but don't tell them).


Marks & Spencer's Easter Biscuits - flavoured with mixed spice (cinnamon, coriander, ginger, aniseed, dill, cloves, nutmeg), and a dash of lemon juice).


Easter chick. Who are you calling ugly?