Chocolate Flapjack Destroys Your Life!

What have you heard about British cooking? Well, let me tell you, it is probably all true. Therefore, when old Ken finds something in England worth eating it is not only cause for celebration, but something I want to share with you. Key words: “Chocolate Flapjack.”


This fine example was purchased in Oxford, but I have reason to believe they may well be available elsewhere in the UK. Like most good foods, the concept is simple: make a base akin to an oatmeal raisin cookie (sans raisins, unless you’re crazy like that). Thus, salt, butter and oatmeal. Then melt some sort of delicious chocolate—or, hell, anything you want (except that wretched raspberry marshmallow fluff you used to eat)—on top. Milk chocolate was involved in the specimen I sampled, which did tend to make it a little too sweet. Old Ken would prefer a darker chocolate, but as you will see from the accompanying photographs, such trifles were of little consequence to overall enjoyment. Once coated, the mixture is presumably refrigerated (I’m just guessing here) until the chocolate has solidified and is then cut into rectangular bars. I ate an entire block of this stuff yesterday, but will no doubt die of gout or dropsy if I touch another bite of this delicious sample. But, overall, butter, chocolate, oats: what else do you want?


That reminds me of a little story I want to tell you. Do you remember that time that we went to Octaves music? This was back when it was next to the Panda Gardens in that small, depressing shopping center off the main strip in West Lebanon, just south of Denny’s. Let me refresh your memory: we go in, you’re making small talk with the proprietor (whose name is Octavian ... hence Octaves! thanks, pal), and I was absentmindedly browsing. It was hard to ignore what the shopkeeper was watching—a late ‘70s AC/DC concert movie. As a devastating cymbal roll, guitar rail-slide, and blood-curdling Bon Scott screech were punctuating the exhilarating climax of some song like “The Jack” (perhaps not a reference to venereal disease as we had long though but a plea for a flapjack?) or “Problem Child,” the shop proprietor sidled over to me. Noting my expression of rapt admiration, he asked this hallowed question—one humans have been asking, in one way or another, since bipedal locomotion became an evolutionary necessity and the basic inquiry that keeps me awake at night. “Bon Scott,” he intoned reverentially, “what else do you want?” Well, if you get exhausted trying to answer this question, perhaps a chocolate flapjack will revive you.