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While the dates softened, I started preparing the base. I creamed butter and raw sugar, then beat in egg and golden syrup. Into this mixture I added vanilla essence, wholemeal flour, basking powder, salt, porridge oats and coconut. It took a bit of mixing to get this to a decent consistency, but eventually I had a thick doughy mixture.
By this time, the dates had softened up nicely. I took them off the heat and set them aside to cool while I pressed the base into the tin. I used only half the mixture, utilising a wet spoon to smooth it out until it evenly coated the base of the tin.
I then spread over the base mixture. 1 1/2 cups had seemed like a lot of dates while I was chopping them, but it doesn't amount to much filling - it was spread very thinly over the base.
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The final touch, once the slice had cooled, was lemon icing. I whipped up a quick icing, roughly based on the Edmonds one. I was slightly hampered by the fact that the lemon I'd counted on using turned out to be mouldy (and I only bought it a few days ago!) so I had to settle for a few drops of lemon essence.
I'd made the icing quite thick, so I made use of my handy wet spoon again, repeatedly dipping it in hot water to get that icing smoothed out.
When the icing had set, I cut the slice into squares, quite forgetting it's supposed to be 'bars'. It's also supposed to make 36, but I'd be interested to see how that's supposed to work! I'd used a tin only slightly smaller than the recommended 20x30, and mine made 20 small squares.
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