'Cardiac cooking' has a new darling - the Snickers pie, writes Shane Hegarty
'Roll pastry and line the tin." Okay. "Beat mascarpone, soft cheese and sugar together and add eggs." Yum. "Chop up five Snickers bars." Huh? "Fold them in to mixture and cook for 35 minutes." Pass the Rennies.
That is how you make Snickers pie, a recipe this week declared to be one of the unhealthiest ever published, thanks to its whopping 1,250 calories, 22 teaspoons of fat and 11 teaspoons of sugar per slice. It was recommended on the BBC by TV chef Anthony Worrall-Thompson as a one-off treat for kids' parties. While it was never likely to feature on the menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant, even the BBC has decided not to offer viewers second helpings and has dropped the recipe from its website.
While Worrall-Thompson has been credited with inventing the recipe, Snickers pie has been around for a while. Predictably, the Americans came up with it first. There, you can order the dish in plenty of restaurants and if the health professionals may not be too keen, the recipe has won chocolate-lovers awards. Versions of it can be found in various cookbooks. Add whipped cream if you want. And biscuit crumbs. And chocolate chips. And have a bucket handy, because you'll probably need it.
Snickers pie (Marathon pie if you never took to the name change) is from a particularly American genre, the candy bar recipe, and which includes such delights as Milky Way cake and M&M ice cream. The US, though, often revels in a culture of gluttony, and there has been something of an arms race to come up with the largest, most dangerous concoctions. At present, the world's biggest burger, the Beer Barrel Belly Buster, is served in a Pennsylvania pub. It is 4.75kg of beef garnished with 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, a cup-and-a-half each of mayonnaise, relish, ketchup, mustard and banana peppers, and is served on a frisbee-sized burger bun. Anyone who can eat it within six hours gets it for free.
But cardiac-cooking is not just an American obsession. The Scottish seem to take it as some sort of national duty to invent ever more perilous recipes, with haggis almost usurped as a national dish by the deep-fried Mars bar (420 calories). Among the world's most simple recipes - "take one Mars bar. Deep fry it." - it was an offshoot of the deep-fried pizza, and progenitor of such modern delicacies as deep-fried Snickers and, intriguingly, the deep-fried Creme Egg. How do you eat yours? With paramedics on stand-by.
If only it had stopped with chocolate. When nutritionists went to Scotland in the hope of revealing the deep-fried Mars bar to be an urban myth, their subsequent report in the Lancet would have been shorter if they'd made a list of the things chippers didn't deep-fat fry. Surveying 300 chip shops, they found the following dipped in boiling fat: pineapple rings, bananas, pickled eggs, haggis and, impressively, ice cream. Three-quarters of the customers, it turned out, were children.
Obviously, the Scottish aren't dining on such delicacies every night of the week, but they have the highest rate of heart disease in the UK, which somewhat challenges research released this week that claimed a low-fat diet doesn't reduce types of cancer and heart disease in women over 50. The way it was presented in the media, you might have thought it was fine to treat yourself to regular helpings of whatever you fancy, when in fact the researchers admitted that the results were skewed partly by the fact that many of the women in the study just couldn't stick to the low-fat diet.
We have a fatal attraction to fat, but for something to be at the Snickers pie level of gluttony it helps if the recipe mixes a couple of ingredients that sound like they shouldn't share the same kitchen, never mind the same oven. How about a breakfast of candied bacon (bacon and lashings of brown sugar)? And Elvis famously enjoyed a midnight snack of grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches, which weighed in at 450 calories. At least that contained some fruit, although that was no excuse to occasionally eat a dozen at one sitting.
Sweet tooth: a recipe for disaster?
Snickers Pie Recipe (consume at your own risk). Serves four.
Ingredients
One packet puff pastry, 140g/5oz mascarpone, 110g/4oz soft cheese, 50g/2oz caster sugar, three eggs, five Snickers bars, chopped roughly.
Method Preheat oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Roll pastry to 3-4mm thick and use to line a 20cm/8in fluted tart tin. Beat the mascarpone, soft cheese and sugar together in a large bowl, until smooth. Beat in eggs, one at a time.
Add the Snickers bars and fold in. Pour into the lined tart tin, and spread to the edges. Place in the oven for 10 minutes, then lower to 180C/ 350F/Gas 4 for a further 25 minutes, until golden and set. Allow to cool before serving.