Chocolate Concrete Recipe

Chocolate concrete is the classic school-dinner chocolate traybake — the one that got its name honestly. It is not a brownie and it does not pretend to be: a plain flour, cocoa and sugar mix bound with melted butter or margarine, pressed hard into a tin and baked until firm, dry and satisfyingly solid. No egg, no faff, just a storecupboard traybake that dinner ladies across Britain turned out by the trayful through the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The full ingredients, timings and step-by-step method are in the recipe card below.

Chocolate Concrete

The classic school-dinner chocolate traybake — deliberately firm and dry rather than fudgy, cut into squares and traditionally served with pink custard.

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Prep Time 15 minutes mins

Cook Time 25 minutes mins

Course Dessert

Cuisine English

Servings 16 squares

Ingredients

  

• 250 g plain flour
• 75 g cocoa powder
• 200 g caster sugar plus 2 tbsp extra for sprinkling
• 150 g butter or margarine melted
• 1 pinch salt optional

Instructions

 

• Preheat the oven to 160°C fan (180°C / gas mark 4). Grease and line a 20cm (8in) square tin.
• Sift the flour, cocoa powder, sugar and salt (if using) into a large bowl and mix well.
• Pour in the melted butter or margarine and mix until it comes together into a stiff, biscuit-like dough. It will look far too dry at first — keep working it through and it will bind.
• Tip the mixture into the tin and press it down firmly and evenly with the back of a spoon, right into the corners, until the surface is smooth and compacted.
• Bake for 20–25 minutes. It will still feel soft in the middle when it comes out of the oven — that is correct. It firms up, hard and dry, as it cools.
• Scatter the extra sugar over the top while it is still warm, then cut into squares within about ten minutes of coming out of the oven, while it is still just pliable enough to cut cleanly. Leave to cool completely in the tin before lifting out.
• Serve as it is, or with pink custard for the full school-dinner effect.

Notes

This is the traditional eggless version — flour, cocoa, sugar and melted butter or margarine bound together and baked hard, rather than a fudgy brownie-style batter. Pink custard is traditionally a strawberry or raspberry blancmange made up with milk rather than a true egg custard, though some versions use a milkshake-and-egg-yolk method for a creamier finish.

Tips and variations

The whole point of chocolate concrete is that it is not fudgy. If your mixture feels wet enough to spoon rather than press, add a little more flour — you are after a stiff, biscuit-like dough that looks too dry right up until it isn’t. Press it into the corners of the tin properly; a thin, even layer bakes and cuts far better than a lopsided one. No proper school-dinner plate arrived without a jug of pink custard alongside — traditionally a strawberry or raspberry blancmange made up with milk rather than a true egg custard, though a milkshake-and-egg-yolk version gives a creamier finish if you want to go to the trouble. Either way, it is the correct partner: something cold and faintly sweet against all that dry, dense chocolate.

Four storecupboard ingredients, no eggs, no specialist tin: this is about as cheap a traybake as it gets, and it stretches to sixteen squares for the cost of a bar of chocolate. Good for a school-holiday afternoon, better for a memory-lane moment with a pot of tea.

If you enjoyed the nostalgia of this one, our Mrs Robins Fruit Cake is cut from the same cloth — another old-fashioned, no-fuss bake that owes nothing to a food processor and everything to a good memory.