Quantities and Philosphies

A quick word about quantities. I'm using Australian standard cup and spoon measures, and metric weights and linear measures. If you need conversion, it's no more than a Google search away. But there's no need to be absolutely precise.  

Cooking is chemistry plus art, and can sustain subtle variations in the combinations of ingredients without ruining, or even substantially changing, the outcome. If you're 10mL short here, or 20g over there, it's not usually going to be a big problem. All you'll end up doing is creating your extremely slightly different version of the slice, instead of a slavish recreation of mine. 

Note, however, this approach doesn't apply to ingredients which have major chemical effects, e.g. raising agents, gelatine. You need to get that stuff right.

In addition, any oven temperatures in these recipes assume a fan forced oven is in use. If your oven is not fan-forced, you will need to adjust temperatures a bit, and pay attention to turning what's in the oven to ensure it doesn't cook unevenly. Generally, add 20 degrees C for non-fan forced but at lower temperatures, add 10 (e.g. 100C fan forced = 110C non-fan), and at the high end, add 30C (e.g. 220C fan forced = 250C non-fan forced).

Also, I've been exclusively using skim sweetened condensed milk since the day I couldn't find non-skim on a supermarket shelf, and have not been disappointed with the results. You can be reasonably assured that, if you're trying to keep things a bit less naughty, you're not sacrificing quality or consistency by using the skim version.

Some may be asking themselves "Surely he didn't come up with this stuff out of his own head - where are these recipes coming from?" Good question. I've surfed the web to find the required recipes, and to combine elements of disparate examples, to come up with the recipes presented here. It is obviously not on to pass off someone else's recipes as your own, and I have gone to some lengths to ensure that's not what I'm doing. Safety first!

More than anything, I hope you enjoy the recipes and their results. There's nothing wrong with mucking about a bit with them, to make them how you want them to be. That's the delight of cooking - taking something interesting and making it your own. That's how I ended up producing lemon jelly slice - by trying to expand the slice repertoire to include more things that my wife actually wanted to eat!