Moving Home Cherry Flapjack.

Good Afternoon. Did you know I’m moving? Yes that’s right, moving house moving. It’s crept up on me a bit, we’ve been thinking that it was a good idea for ages now, but umming and aaaring about if it really was best and where we should go dadidada and then all of a sudden, we’ve got to be gone from our lovely seaside flat next week. Aaah I really only just realised how soon it was just the other day...woops.

We’re not going to a far away new place or for any particularly exciting reason but moving is moving. Moving is sorting STUFF, and packing STUFF and buying home magazines so you can imagine that your teensy one bedroom can somehow be transformed into a vintage interior-ed giant country pile and moving is, most relevantly to this little computer-based space, eating your way through the freezer and getting inventive with half a packet of pasta and a tin of baked beans.

I kind of like culinary constraints like that sometimes, if you still want deliciousness it means you have to get creative and think and make in a way that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise. These flapjacks are that. I definitely wouldn’t have added local frozen cherries to the humble flapjack, or made them with half oats and half oatmeal, were I not trying to save these ingredients a journey, especially before I have even given you a recipe for lovely normalnormal flapjacks...and that would have been a shame because I wouldn’t have had my flapjacks studded with shiny black jewels, maybe I wouldn’t have made them at all. I always forget how lovely the product of just a few stirs can be until the syrupy smell wafts from the oven. We all would have missed out.

So half oats and half oatmeal and half “I’m sorry I’m inflicting my self inflicted culinary constraints on you” and half “YeY let’s get creative and read Country Living”. You don’t need to be moving to make these...use my inconvenience to your tummy’s benefit. With Love and Cake.

Cherry Studded Flapjacks

A few notes:

• I used my cherries straight from the freezer, stirring them in frozen. You could absolutely use fresh ones but I imagine they would get a bit more mushed and turn everything a bit more cherry coloured. Nothing wrong with that though.
• If you haven't got oatmeal and frozen cherries to use up and just want normalnormal flapjack, leave both ingredients out and double the quantity of oats.
• Feel free to add whatever you fancy instead of the cherries too; dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips....

Makes 9 fat squares

You will need

a 20cm square tin, greased and lined

100g butter

100g soft brown sugar

3 tbsp golden syrup

110g oats

110g oatmeal

175g cherries

• First as usual preheat your oven to 180°c.
• Now gently heat you butter, sugar and syrup in a nice big pan, stirringstirring until the butter has melted and the sugar mostly dissolved.
• Stir in the oats until really well combined then gently stir through your cherries.
• Tumble the mixture into your prepared tin and smooth and press the top of the oats down to fill every nook and cranny of your tin and to get a nice shiny surface.
• Bake for around 30 minutes until bronzed all over.
• Cut into squares and run a knife around the edge of the tin while the flapjacks are still warm so you don't get your edges stuck and then leave it all to cool completely in the tin.
• Eat with a nice cup of tea on the side.