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So the other weekend, I took part along with m’colleague Chris in NomNomNom ’11 – a kind of Mastercheffy cooking contest for bloggers. It was, as always, huge fun (also as always, I didn’t win.) I was hoping to write up my full experience, but unfortunately I find myself in a field in Derbyshire with only my phone to blog from. As such, this is a bit truncated… but it does give you probably the most requested recipe I cooked on the day, for Billionaire’s Shortbread.

Billionaire’s Shortbread is like Millionaire’s Shortbread, except MUCH MORE CLASSY. By which I mean it’s got peanuts in it, and is decorated with gold dust. Peanuts, of course, are noted for their exclusivity and connotations of a luxury jet-set lifestyle. Note: the alternative name for this recipe, which it was given on the day, is “Posh Snickers”.

Billionaire’s Shortbread

For the shortbread
Ingredients:
250g Plain Flour
75g Caster Sugar
185g Butter

Mix the ingredients up in a big bowl until you’re got a nice, smooth, malleable gloop that – assuming you’ve measured all the things right – should be substantial enough that you can pick it up and shape it without it trying to escape.

Stick this into a pre-greased cake tin, or similar receptacle – you’ll want something roughly a foot square. Ish. Slap it about a bit until it’s roughly flat and evenly distributed across the tin. Whack this into an oven pre-heated to 180°C for around twenty minutes (until the surface starts to turn golden), then once it’s done, allow it to cool and harden. Because you’re probably impatient, “allow it to cool” means “stick it in the fridge”.

For those of you who like to keep up with such things, this is what’s technically known as a “buttery biscuit base”.

For the peanut butter layer
Ingredients:
A jar of crunchy peanut butter

Scoop about half the peanut butter into a bowl, and stick it in the microwave on a medium heat until it’s a bit runnier than it normally is.

Once your buttery biscuit base is cool and solid enough that you can do things to it, slop your slightly melty peanut butter all over it and spread it out evenly.

This is definitely the easiest step of the recipe, which given that the rest are also very easy is saying something. Also, you’ve got half a jar of peanut butter left over. Bonus.

For the caramel layer
Ingredients:
40g Butter
50g Light Muscavado Sugar
400g Condensed Milk
1 tsp Cornflour
Large handful of salted peanuts

First, pummel the crap out of your peanuts with a pestle & mortar (or other peanut-destroying device), until your large handful of peanuts becomes a large handful of small peanut fragments. Retain your fragments in a bowl for later.

Splodge the butter, sugar and condensed milk into a saucepan, and stir constantly over a medium heat for some time until it starts to thicken. At this point, carry on stirring over a medium heat for longer than you might think. Basically, the point is it needs to be really rather thick – if it’s too runny, it’ll RUIN EVERYTHING. Once you’re convinced it’s really quite thick (little bits will probably have started caramelising), stir in the cornflour for added thickening, then stir in the peanut fragments.

Spread all this lot over your buttery biscuit base and peanut layer, then “allow it to cool” (stick it in the fridge) again.

For the chocolate layer
Ingredients:
150g Milk Chocolate
50g Dark Chocolate
Gold Dust (edible type)

Obvious bit: once your caramel later has solidified a bit, melt the chocolate in a bowl in the microwave. If you do this cleverly and just stir it gently, the milk and dark chocolate should make a pretty swirly pattern. Put your melty swirly chocolate over the caramel and spread until it’s even.

Then comes the pointless but fun  tarting-up section. Get a small amount of edible gold dust, and using a very fine sieve, scatter it lightly over the chocolate.

(Edible gold dust note: you know how the phrase “it’s like gold dust” normally denotes that something is very rare and extremely expensive? Turns out you can get small pots of it in Waitrose for under four quid.)

Allow to cool (FRIDGE) again, then serve (ideally) when the chocolate is mostly solid but still slightly gooey. If you’ve done it right, it should have roughly the density of a neutron star, and should be able to give a horse diabetes at fifty paces.