Sweet · In Afrikaans: Peppermint Crisp-tert

Peppermint Crisp tart

Name: Peppermint Crisp tart
Prep time: 20 min
Total time: 4 h 20 min
Yield: 12
Cuisine: South African
Ingredients: 500 ml whipping cream, well chilled; 395 g tinned caramel; 200 g Tennis biscuits or other coconut biscuits; 2 bars Peppermint Crisp (49 g each), coarsely grated

Caramel, cream and crushed mint chocolate between coconut biscuits, left in the fridge overnight. No oven, no fire, twenty minutes of work — and the pudding every South African child recognises.

The Peppermint Crisp is a South African chocolate bar from the 1960s: a tube of green, shattering mint crystals in milk chocolate. The tart made from it is younger and consists of three shop-bought things — the bar, tinned caramel and Tennis biscuits, the coconut biscuits that sit in every supermarket. Which is exactly why everyone makes it.

Prep: 20 min
Marinating: 4 hr
On the fire: —
Serves: 12

Sweet

Peppermint Crisp-tert

Right at the end

When it goes on

Right at the end

Pudding in the last of the heat — or something that needs no fire at all.

Equipment: nothing

This line

Made at the Capelate 20th century to today

The hinged grid as a baking tin, the packet product as an ingredient, the vegetarian main course at a meat fire.

Ingredients

Serves

Units

2 ingredients are hard to find abroad — Peppermint Crisp, Tennis Biscuits. What to use instead →

Tick them off — the ticks stay on this device.

Cream

500 ml whipping cream, well chilled
395 g tinned caramel In South Africa it is sold as Caramel Treat or Top'n'Fill. Elsewhere, sweetened condensed milk boiled unopened for three hours is the same thing — or ready-made dulce de leche.

Layers

200 g Tennis biscuits or other coconut biscuits A plain butter biscuit will do; you lose the coconut but keep the structure.
2 bars Peppermint Crisp (49 g each), coarsely grated Without a South African shop: dark chocolate with a crisp mint filling, at a push coarsely chopped After Eight.

Method

Loosen the caramel

Stir the caramel smooth with a fork in a bowl. Straight from the tin it is too stiff to fold into anything.
Whip the cream

Whip the cream to stiff peaks. Stiff means the peaks stand up — cream that is too soft lets the tart collapse.
Bring them together gently

Stir two spoons of cream into the caramel to loosen it. Then fold the caramel into the remaining cream — fold, do not stir. One grated bar goes in at this point.
Layer it

Line a dish of about 23 × 23 cm with biscuits, smooth half the cream over them, another layer of biscuits, then the rest of the cream.
Scatter the top

Grate or break the second bar over the top. The shards are why the tart crunches — which is why they go on last and not into the cream.
At least four hours in the fridge

Cover and refrigerate, at least four hours, better overnight. In that time the biscuits draw moisture and go soft — which is the point.

Tips

Leave it two days and you no longer have a tart but a cream that tastes of biscuit. Overnight is the sweet spot.
It freezes, and half-thawed it becomes an ice-cream cake. That is standard practice at the Cape in summer.
A pinch of salt stirred into the caramel takes the edge off the sweetness without tasting of salt.
As a pudding after a braai it is the obvious choice: it sits finished in the fridge while the fire is still cold.

There are South African puddings made of flour, eggs and effort — melktert, malva pudding, koeksisters. And then there is the Peppermint Crisp tart, made of three shop-bought things, which nonetheless appears on every second birthday table.

You can find that lazy. You can also accept that a pudding taking twenty minutes, needing no oven and pleasing everyone has earned its place.

For a braai it is close to unbeatable. It is finished before anyone arrives, it does not need keeping warm, and it takes up not one minute at the grid.

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