This is the second of the bakes I made for our bank holiday barbecue, at the Pony’s very firm insistence.

I’ve made a chocolate caramel shortbread before, but it wasn’t perfect – the caramel kept burning and the chocolate was too hard to cut neatly – so I decided to try again with a slightly different recipe to iron out the faults.

Instead of cooking the caramel at a boil for 5 minutes, I cooked it on a lower heat for a much longer time, which did stop it burning although it was maybe just a tad on the soft side. I added a spoonful of sunflower oil to the chocolate to go on top so it wouldn’t set quite so hard, and that definitely seemed to work.

I think these were probably the most popular of the things I made for the barbecue, and they’re definitely one of the pony’s favourites (he’s already asking when I’ll make them again!) so if you need a crowd-pleasing dessert, give this a try!

Millionaire’s shortbread (adapted from here and here)

• 165g flour
• 130g butter
• 55g caster sugar
• 1 400g tin condensed milk
• 115g butter
• 40g dark brown sugar
• 150g dark chocolate
• 1 tbsp sunflower oil

Rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the caster sugar and press the mixture down into the base of an 8×8″ square tin, lined with baking paper. Bake at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until just turning golden.

To make the caramel, heat the condensed milk, butter and brown sugar in a saucepan over a medium heat. Keep stirring until the mixture thickens and turns a rich, golden, caramel colour. Pour over the cooled biscuit base, and leave in the fridge to firm up.

For the chocolate layer, melt the chocolate over a pan of simmering water, and then once melted stir in the spoonful of oil. Spread on top of the set caramel and leave to harden. Once the chocolate it set, lift out of the tin and cut into squares or bars. Keep refrigerated.