You can switch up this recipe to use whatever ingredients that take your fancy, it is so forgiving you really can’t mess this one up. You can really pack in the fun ingredients with this one though so it feels like a properly indulgent snack sized treat.

Serves – a big batch suitable to share at a party, maybe about 40 bitesize pieces

Time: 15 minutes plus at least 3 hours chilling in the fridge

Ingredients

• Approx 200g chocolate – use whatever you like but I suggest using mainly dark chocolate as this tends to have a more intense chocolate flavour which won’t get lost amongst the other ingredients. I used a mix of about 180g dark chocolate (54% cocoa solids) and about 30g dairy milk

• 150g unsalted butter

• 2 tsp cocoa powder

• 1 tbsp golden syrup

Inclusions

• 200g digestive biscuits

• 50g mini marshmallows

• 50g hazelnuts (peeled, or you can roughly remove the skins once roasted)

• 50g raisins

• 25g glace cherries

• 2 Cadburys crunchie bars

Other suggestions

• Rich tea biscuits

• Dried cranberries or other dried fruit

• Other nuts e.g. pecans, walnuts, peanuts, macadamia nuts

• Marzipan (cut in to small pieces)

• Dessicated coconut

• Other chocolate bars e.g. bounties, rolos, snickers, M&Ms, maltesers

• White chocolate chunks

• Mini pretzels

• Popcorn

• Basically whatever you like, though I would not recommend fresh fruit

Optional additional topping

• Approx. 150 g chocolate + approx. 50g butter. I don’t always add a chocolate layer on top though it is a nice finishing touch if you fancy the extra indulgence. I did this time round as I had seized the chocolate and after saving it (see my other entry on how to save seized chocolate), had to use it somewhere and thought, why not!

Method

Heat the oven to 200c and place the hazelnuts on a baking tray to roast for about 10 minutes, you should see they have a little bit of colour and start to become fragrant.

Put a small pan of water on the stove and heat, place a glass or metal mixing bowl on top. Once the water is simmering turn the heat to low.

Break the chocolate in to pieces and cube the butter then add to the bowl. Add the golden syrup and the cocoa powder and stir from time to time whilst it melts down. Once melted, take off the heat to cool.

Whilst that is happening you can prepare the rest of the ingredients. Break down the digestive biscuits either in a food processor by just pulsing quickly a few times or by putting the biscuits in a bag and crushing with a rolling pin. You should be left with different size pieces ranging from crumbs to chunky pieces (I personally like big bits of biscuit).

Once the hazelnuts are cooled, roughly chop them (I like to shed the skins off the hazelnuts at this point, you will find that they come off anyway as you chop them so you just need to pick the nuts out).

Roughly chop the glace cherries and crunchie bars. The raisins and mini marshmallows are small enough that they don’t need chopping, but if you are using any other inclusions that are chunky, then roughly chop them.

Line a deep baking tray with baking parchment, I used a tray that is 23cm x 28cm.

Once the chocolate mixture and bowl have cooled so they are no longer hot (and therefore will not melt the marshmallows and other chocolate ingredients that you may be adding) then mix in all the ingredients gently into the chocolate.

Give it a good stir so everything is coated then pour the mix in to the baking tray and flatten it out on top and into the corners.

Optional chocolate topping

If you want to finish off your rocky road with an extra little layer of indulgence, adding some melted chocolate on top is a nice touch. Simply melt the chocolate with the butter as you did at the beginning and once melted, pour on top of the rocky road and smooth out. You can add as much or as little as you want, from a drizzle to a full on thick layer of chocolate to give a smooth finish on top.

Loosely cover the baking tray with cling film and pop in to the fridge for at least 3 hours for the rocky road to firm up, overnight is best but you can certainly eat it after a few hours, it’s just that the chocolate will be set but still quite soft.