How to Make Chocolate Covered Caramel Biscuits

How's it going my busy bunch of bakers? Welcome back to the channel. In today's video, I'll show you how to make chocolate covered caramel biscuits, kinda like Twix. So let's get in the kitchen and see how it's done. These delicious little fingers involve a few interesting methods of preparation. These treats are made up of three recipes, starting with the light and crumbly biscuit, then the rich and slightly chewy caramel, and finally, the shiny and snappy tempered chocolate coating. Each of the recipes can be used in different applications, so we're not just making imitation Twix here, we are practicing three skills, which we will be able to apply to other recipes in the future, but this one is definitely a good one to begin with. So let's just get right to it, let me show you how it's made, starting with the ingredients. And the good thing is that there's not many of them. We'll need some plain white flour, butter, sugar, egg yolks, some type of syrup, like golden syrup, honey, or glucose, some more butter, some more sugar, double or heavy cream, and some chocolate. The first thing we need to do, switch on the oven. To 150 degrees Celsius, 300 Fahrenheit, fan on. That'll be 170 Celsius, or 340 Fahrenheit, fan off. While the oven is preheating, we can move on with making the biscuit base. Combine the flour, the sugar, and the butter in a large bowl. Coat the butter pieces in flour, and then start breaking them up. Crumble the butter till the mix becomes nice and uniform. It should end up looking kind of like wet sand. Once the mix has reached the desired texture, add the egg yolks. I know I showed you 3 egg yolks earlier, but I ended up using less. Just follow the written instructions, and don't get confused. After adding in the egg yolk, grab your dough scraper, and mix it to a smooth dough. It will be quite soft, but it won't be sticky. I know I'm calling this biscuit dough, but that's only because it's going inside the Twix. Because it contains egg yolks, I would normally call this pastry, and you can definitely use this as a base for a tart. Once your biscuit or pastry is fully mixed, place it on a floured surface, dust it with more flour, and shape it into a long rectangle, measuring at slightly more than 30 by 10 cm, and that'll be 12 by 4 inches. Next up, trim off the edges, and then cut the dough into 2 cm or 0.8 inch wide fingers. You should end up with 15 of them. Place the biscuit fingers on a non-stick paper lined baking tray. They will not spread out at all, so you don't need to leave very big spaces between them. These bad boys are ready for the oven. They'll take around 20 minutes to fully bake. You could also prepare them a day ahead of time, keep the tray in the fridge, and then just bake them when you're ready. Once they have developed a nice even light brown colour all over, they're ready. Get them out of the oven, place them on a rack to cool down, and then place the rack in the fridge. You want these biscuits to be cold. Next up, let's make the caramel. To save time, you can easily make this whilst the biscuits are baking. In a small pan, combine the sugar and the syrup. Place the pan on high heat and let this mix melt completely. Once it starts bubbling, keep an eye on it. Keep cooking it. You want to let it cook until it slightly darkens. Next, add the butter and mix it in until it's completely melted. And then finally, add the double cream and mix that in too. Keep cooking the caramel until it reaches 110°C or 230°F. Once it reaches that temperature, cook it for another 30 seconds, no more. Essentially, what we're trying to do here is get rid of any water in the mix. Both the butter and the double cream contain water. We need to let it evaporate. And of course, we need to get some caramelization going. It's not called caramel for nothing. It should develop a beautiful brown colour. Ok, the temperature has been reached. I'm cooking this for another 30 seconds and now it's done. Take the caramel off the heat and immediately transfer it to a bowl. And then leave it to cool down at room temperature. If it gets too cool, it'll be difficult to work with. So if you're not planning to pipe the caramel onto the biscuits on the same day, then leave it in the bowl. Don't put it in a piping bag, because they ain't gonna come out. Reheat it slightly before you're ready to use it and then put it in a piping bag. You can reheat your caramel in the microwave or place the bowl of caramel into another bowl full of hot water. Of course, if you're not using a metal nozzle in your piping bag like I am, then you could reheat the piping bag with the caramel in the microwave. And by the way, the nozzle is not necessary. I'm just using it because I have it. Once you're ready to pipe, remove the biscuits from the fridge and squeeze on a nice thick line of caramel in each of them. There should be just enough caramel to top all the biscuits. I know there are only 12 biscuits on the screen right now, but there was plenty of caramel left over in the piping bag. You could leave the caramel as it is, but to give it a nice shape and to make it easier for us to top it with chocolate, you can carefully spread it out using a spatula. But be careful, because it's very easy to break the biscuit. These things must be returned to the fridge. Let's temper the chocolate now. In order for it to be shiny and snappy, it needs to be brought up to a certain temperature and then cooled down again. Place a bowl over a pot of water. Make sure the water is not touching the bottom of the bowl. Drop three quarters of the chocolate into the bowl and reserve one quarter for later. Place the pot on the cooker and let the water come up to a boil. Once the water starts simmering, the chocolate will start melting. Once it has completely melted, start checking the temperature. Bring it up to 45 to 50 degrees Celsius. And that is 113 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove the bowl from the pan and carefully wipe off any liquid from the bottom of it. Even a single drop of water in your chocolate may ruin it. Now add the remaining chocolate and mix it until it's completely melted. Our goal here is to cool the chocolate down to a certain temperature. To make the process quicker, I'm going to transfer it to a new bowl. The chocolate that I'm using must be cooled down to 27 degrees Celsius or 81 degrees Fahrenheit. Different chocolates require different temperatures. Dark chocolate should be cooled down to around 30 degrees Celsius or 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The chocolate that I'm using has specific tempering instructions on the bag and you can't just use any chocolate for this. Look for chocolate which is specifically meant for tempering. Once the chocolate has reached the correct temperature, pour it into a piping bag. For best results, try to work quickly now because as it cools down, it will become thicker. So the biscuits should be already prepared. Place them upside down on a non-stick paper-lined baking tray. Because the biscuits are cold from the fridge, the chocolate will start setting quickly on them. So only work with a few at a time. Pipe a little bit of chocolate on each biscuit and then quickly spread it out using a spatula. To prevent the chocolate in the piping bag from cooling down too soon, you can place it in a warmer area. If you keep it at a constant 30 degrees Celsius or so, it'll be perfect. Once you have finished spreading the chocolate on the bottoms of the first set of biscuits, turn them back the right way up and then repeat the same steps with the remaining biscuits. To be fair, this is quite a fiddly recipe and if you don't feel very confident with things like these, I would suggest cutting the recipe in half and only making 7 biscuits to start with. It took me 4 tries to record this video and of course in the process, I worked out all the kinks for you. But still, if you're a beginner, it might be a good idea to try it first with a few biscuits and only then move on to making 15 if you even need that many. Okay, now comes the most crucial part. You need patience and attention to detail. Both of which I struggle with. Don't work with more than 3 biscuits at a time. Place them on a cooling rack, set over a baking tray and then carefully pipe the chocolate from one end to the other ensuring that the whole surface is covered. As soon as you're done, carefully lift up the biscuit using a small spatula and place it back onto the non-stick paper-lined baking tray. Use a small knife to help you move it off the spatula as you will see me doing in a second. This is a very fiddly job. It is quite difficult to get a nice even finish. Whatever you do, do not touch the biscuits with your fingers. My chocolate was getting a little bit thick at the end. That's why I didn't have enough for all the biscuits. If you keep your chocolate warm, you won't have that problem. Collect the excess chocolate from the tray and put it back in the bag. You can use it again. To get the chocolate off the cooling rack, you can place the rack with the tray in a slightly warm oven and then let it melt and drip down. While the recipe suggests that you will need 500 grams or 18 ounces of chocolate, you'll probably end up using only half of it. The rest can be recycled. But there you have it. That's how you make a chocolate-covered caramel biscuit. It's a bit fiddly, but it's pretty simple. Completing this, you will have learned three valuable recipes and skills and you will have tested your patience too. For more sweet treats, head over to the pastry cakes and sweetbakes playlist. But that'll be all for today. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.