In London you will find some of the best bakeries and pastry shops in the world, and I am not talking about the French pastry shops found all over town.
English cuisine too has an extensive tradition also when it comes to chocolates and desserts of all kinds.
I personally do not like so much factory made candy bars and chocolates so I prefer visiting local confectionery shops and get some fresh fudge. But my absolute favourite chocolate treat is perhaps the Rocky Road.
Rocky Roads are chocolate bars, typically English (naturalized American now) and I think their name refers to their bumpy appearance, full of bumps and holes due to dried fruit in the mixture that can never be leveled, and that resembles the shape of a badly maintained road, perhaps one of those in the mountains.
Many ingredients can be used to make such bars and you can be as creative as you want: nuts, fudge, marshmallows, candied cherries and dry fruits to name a few.
The concept is this: create a layer of slightly creamy chocolates inside a pan, put them in the fridge, then once they have hardened cut them into cubes with a knife. the principle is similar to that of brownies... apart from the fact that you don't cook anything and you pop everything in the fridge to solidify it.
Inside the melted chocolate you may add a bit of everything, you can think of it a bit like a pantry-emptying recipe: marshmallows and cherries to give it a soft texture, dried fruit to give it flavour, biscuits for crunchiness. This is exactly what characterizes them, a continuous variation of textures inside them so even at my favourite confectionery shop the taste is never exactly the same and neither is the texture.
My favourite Rocky Road is full of nuts
Ingredients for about a dozen Rocky road portions:
250 grams of dark chocolate
100 grams of unsalted butter
2 tablespoons of sugar
200 grams of mixed dried fruit (cranberries, peanuts and almonds are my favourite)
8 crushed walnuts
6 crushed biscuits
Preparation:
In a microwave-safe bowl, combine butter, chopped dark chocolate and sugar. Melt.
In the meantime, open the walnuts and chop them into pieces with a knife.
Also take 4 of the 6 biscuits and break them up with your hands, keeping the pieces coarse, about the size of an almond.
Take all the dry ingredients (mix of dried fruit, walnuts and biscuits) and put them in the still warm melted chocolate and mix well until everything is combined.
Pour the mixture into two small square baking dishes measuring 10×10 cm, or into a larger one with foil paper. The mixture must be at least a couple of cm high. The baking dishes must be lined with baking paper, because the Rocky Roads will be put in the fridge to compact and if you don't line them there will be no way to remove them from the baking dishes.
Once the mixture has been poured and leveled, take the 2 remaining biscuits and crumble them between your fingers completely. Cover the surface of the Rocky Roads with the crumbs.
Place in the fridge for about 45 minutes. Then remove the baking trays, pull the tabs of the baking paper and remove the Rocky Roads, which will be a single rigid and compact block, like a huge chocolate bar.
With a smooth-bladed knife cut them into squares of about 3 centimeters.
You will get about 15 bars, enjoy!
