Girdlebuster Pie

Our answer

The Girdlebuster Pie (from Christmas) is a great dessert to make ahead for Christmas or New Year. The topping for the pie is a caramel sauce made from sugar, butter, golden syrup and cream. It may be possible to use maple syrup instead, however this will be quite an expensive alternative as the caramel uses 250ml/1 cup syrup. Also maple syrup has a very strong flavour in comparison with golden syrup and some people may find the flavour to be a little too strong. If you are using maple syrup it may be better to use vanilla ice cream instead of coffee.

One other point to note is that golden syrup is thicker and more gooey than maple syrup and corn syrup so the caramel sauce may be more runny if you use maple syrup and you will need to allow for this when you are serving the pie. You can probably offset the effects of a thinner syrup by boiling the mixture for slightly longer (you would need to boil it close to "soft ball" stage, around 118c/325F) before adding the cream. However we have not tried this and neither have we used either maple syrup or corn syrup to make the pie so we are unable to guarantee the results.