Date Slices
This is a recipe with notable results for little effort. It’s barely unmodified from the Cranks recipe for date slicces,
Reason I’m giving a writeup is because there is much to say about the preparation and results. Which start with what goes in.
Ingredients
Precise here, it needs to be,
350g (12oz) chopped dates
40ml water
1/3 bottle lemon juice
225g (80z) wholemeal flour
100g (4oz) porridge oats
75g (3oz) raw brown sugar
150g (5oz) butter
Note you need the wholemeal flour, and the good stuff may not be in supermarkets
Tools
Nothing special, long as you have an oven
Oven
200°C/400°F/gas mark 6
Make
Put dates, lemon juice and water into a pan then heat on low until mush. You’ll likely need to stir, as the mess gets dense and can easily burn. It should turn sticky and be half‐solid when it cools. Lift it off the heat and allow to cool.
Mix everything else in some container to make a crumble. If you mix with your fingers it makes a sticky dough ball, which is hard to spread. So, if you can, try cutting the powders into the butter. That means the butter must be soft
Press or sprinkle half the crumble into the base of a tray. Spread it very thin, like 1/4 of a thumbnail deep
Spread the date mix on top, then spread the remaining crumble on top of that. The date mix should be stiff, so is less tricky to cover than may be expected
Cook in the oven for 20 mins. Be very careful this doesn’t burn, pull it out if it starts to looks brown
Allow to cool before slicing
I warn from experience. The super‐rich butter pastry/crumble is likely to burn in cheap ovens. Maybe having the recommended tray size, 11in x 7in shallow cake tin, may stop the edges burning, but not a full defence.
Variations
The original uses lemon rind, but I have no access to that so used juice
Needs a lot of dates. I often run out of these so have used some sultanas also, no problem
Discussion
I stay away from pastry as a waste of time for poor results. But this is a simple pastry/crumble mix, so not so troublesome. The trouble is the way it burns easily.
The results, if you can get it right, are well worth your time. You’ll realise how many commercial items ramp up the sugar and flour, perhaps for reasons of stability and preservation. As a friend said, “The sweetness [in the filling] should come from the dates, not the sugar”. Also that commercial offerings rarely reach for a rich pastry from substantial ingredients, settling for more thin and stable ingredients like cheap white flour and mixed veg oils. And where’s the lemon?
References
If you prefer, Cranks writeup. Uses lemon rind,
Feedback
Even my disasters with this have proved popular.