The one recipe here a child could make, and the only thing on this site that solves the problem of wanting something sweet at four in the afternoon with no shop for thirty miles.
Cocoa needs fat and heat to stop tasting chalky. Stirred into cold syrup it stays dusty. Warmed with the oil first, it turns glossy and smells like chocolate rather than like a tin.
- Oil and cocoa in the pan over a low heat. Stir for a minute until it is a smooth dark paste and the raw edge has gone.
- Syrup and sugar in. Stir until it is one glossy sauce and just beginning to bubble at the edges. Take it off the heat here. It does not need to boil and it will turn grainy if it does.
- Cornflakes in, all at once, and fold until every flake is coated. Do it quickly, before the sauce starts to set in the pan.
- Spoon into rough heaps on anything flat. Leave them twenty minutes.
They will not set hard and they are not meant to. Without cocoa butter there is nothing to crystallise, so what you get is chewy and crisp rather than snappy.
100 g of cornflakes is about half a litre of volume, so this is bulky for what it weighs. Worth knowing before it goes in a rucksack.