Polish no-bake chocolate block: the communist-era fudge with powdered milk and biscuits
The dessert many who grew up in communist-era Poland remember from grandmother's fridge: a syrup of butter, sugar and cocoa, powdered milk, broken tea biscuits and walnuts, pressed into a loaf tin and chilled. It belongs to the years when chocolate was hard to find in the shops, and it survived simply because it is delicious. A quarter of an hour of work, four hours in the fridge, nearly thirty thin slices.
Your own work in that: 35 min.
- Cocoa syrup 10 min
- Mixing 15 min
- Setting in the fridge 240 min
- Slicing 10 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneBoil the syrup
In a saucepan melt the butter with the sugar, water, cocoa and vanilla sugar. Bring to the boil, whisking, and boil 2 minutes, until the sugar dissolves and the syrup is smooth and glossy. Take off the heat and cool 5 minutes.
Ingredients: 250 g butter · 150 g sugar · 100 ml water · 4 tbsp cocoa powder · 1 tbsp vanilla sugar · 400 g powdered milk
TipThe syrup should be hot but not boiling when the powdered milk goes in. Boiling syrup seizes the milk into hard lumps you can't work out.
A smooth, glossy cocoa syrupStir in the powdered milk
Add the powdered milk to the warm syrup in batches, 3–4 spoons at a time, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon until each batch disappears. The mass turns thick, creamy and shiny, like soft fudge. Rub any lumps against the side of the pan with the spoon.
In batches, to a thick creamy massAdd the biscuits and nuts
Break the biscuits by hand into fingernail-sized pieces, chop the walnuts coarsely. Fold them and the raisins into the mass briefly, so the biscuits stay in pieces; they make the characteristic mosaic in the slice.
Ingredients: 200 g tea biscuits · 100 g walnuts · 50 g raisins
Biscuit pieces, walnuts, raisinsPress into the tin
Line the loaf tin with foil or paper with an overhang. Transfer the mass and press down firmly with the back of a spoon, layer by layer, so no gaps remain. Level the top and cover with foil.
TipA loosely packed block crumbles when sliced. Press as if firming soil in a flowerpot: the mass should be as dense as a brick.
Press hard, no gapsChill
Refrigerate 4 hours, ideally overnight. The butter sets and the block turns firm enough to cut into thin slices.
Slice thinly
Lift the block out by the foil, unwrap and cut with a large knife into slices 1 cm thick; a knife dipped in hot water cuts cleanly. Keeps in a box in the fridge up to 2 weeks, in the freezer 3 months; straight from the freezer it eats like ice cream.
Centimetre slices, a hot-water knife
Before you start
With puffed corn or mini choux
Replace half the biscuits with 50 g corn puffs or small choux buns: a popular variation, lighter and crunchier.
More chocolatey
100 g dark chocolate in pieces into the syrup and the cocoa reduced to 3 spoons. Darker, less sweet, closer to a truffle.
Too stiff to stir
Too much powdered milk, or the syrup too cold. Add 2–3 spoons of hot milk and stir; the mass should fall off the spoon in large pieces, not stand like modelling clay.
