If you’ve never eaten a Jaffa Cake, there’s still time!  Despite its biscuit-like dimensions, the Jaffa Cake is just that; a cake.  Don’t believe me?  Simply leave one on the side for a day or so, and it’ll go hard, not soft like biscuits do.

If you’re still wondering what a Jaffa Cake is, well it’s a round little sponge cake containing orange jelly and topped with a thin layer of chocolate.  Actually, that description really doesn’t do any favours for what must be one of my most beloved treats.  There are few other snacks that I devour as quickly (popcorn, pretzels, honey roasted nuts and crisps are up there).  Jaffa Cakes are just so easy to eat and so much fun.

So where do they come into the realm of recipes?  Well, with spring beginning to gain momentum, I’m looking forward to the return of ice-cream and treats that refresh rather than stodgy puddings.  A recent meal at a nearby pub inspired me to come up with a fun sundae that I could enjoy.  Pubs have started to shift their focus toward good value meals and several chains have revamped their menus to include desserts topped with this and that and tagged with a catchy name.  Sadly, I’ve yet to taste one that lives up to the lively description in the menu.  My sundae arrived with little fanfare and amounted to three pieces of honeycomb floating in a pool of melted vanilla ice-cream.  Hardly the show-stopper pictured on the glossy menu.  I knew I could do better.  I knew my kids could do better.  Enter the Jaffa Cake Sundae.

It’s become something of a trend to use branded confection to sell below-standard food to the brand-loving consumer.  I wanted to avoid this kind of unimaginative approach.  I didn’t want ice-cream simply topped with a bar of my favourite chocolate.  Instead, I wanted components that would work together to give an overall taste and texture of things that I love.  The chocolate, orange jelly and sponge of a Jaffa Cake could be an interesting experiment.  With that in mind, I decided to load up on simple items that could create a satisfying sundae based on Jaffa Cakes.

What follows is less a recipe and more a description of what I did with several shop-bought items.  It’s so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t do it before and it’s delicious!

Jaffa Cake Sundae

Packet of orange flavoured jelly (prepared according to packet instructions)

Madeira cake

Vanilla ice-cream

For the sauce

50g dark chocolate

50g milk chocolate

Lyle’s Golden Syrup

butter

This is an out and out assembly job, hence the lack of detailed measurements.  In truth, you can add as little or as much as you like of each ingredient to suit your taste and whatever you are choosing to serve your sundae in.  This time, I chose a chubby tumbler to stuff full of Jaffa goodness!

Begin by making the chocolate sauce.  In a bowl, melt the chocolate with a little butter and a good table spoon of golden syrup.  Stir and set to one side to cool slightly.

Next, slice a thin piece of Madeira cake and press onto the bottom of the glass.  Add a generous layer of jelly.  Top the jelly with a few scoops of vanilla ice-cream and pour plenty of the sauce over it all.  You can repeat these layers if you’re using a tall glass.

This is now my new guilty, summer pleasure!