I’ve been horribly lazy and I would like to apologise.  Ever since I got back from Malaysia (a week ago) I’ve been loafing about, waking up past 11 and blaming it all on jetlag. With 5 hours difference between New Zealand and Malaysia I get the feeling that I don’t really get to play the jetlag card. The only thing struggling to catch up to the new time zone is my stomach.

There was a slight hiccup in my flight back though, that hiccup can be called Etihad. They sold myself and 6 other passengers flights from Singapore to Christchurch allowing us only 50 minutes to disembark our first flight, get to the transit desk and board onto our second. Needless to say none of us made it. Then we were told by the transit desk that a representative called Karen would be coming shortly to let us know what was happening and what we could expect. After 2 hours waiting in the departure lounge we gave up waiting for Karen, she never actually turned up in the end. We got a guy called Simon.

Simon handed us food vouchers for lunch – YAY WE CAN AFFORD TO EAT NOW – and told us to hang around (as if we were going anywhere) and he’d call us all in about an hour once the final bits and pieces had been settled. Great, more waiting around. Finally we were told everything was ready for us, Etihad was very sorry for the inconvenience and there were no flights going out for the rest of the day. Instead we would leave the next morning and hey, we’ll be nice and pay for your hotel. Despite the service we FINALLY received, I will never fly Etihad ever again. Cramped seating, poor food, poor service and unusually rock hard seats for a long haul flight. I might add that this is definitely not a budget airline. It made for one of the worst flying combinations I’ve ever had, and I fly a lot. The only good thing about it was making a brief and comical friend, Jethro. He made the entire ordeal of Singapore to Brisbane flight enjoyable so thanks, I hope you are having crazy fantastic adventures in Australia right now.

Rant over, pie time. This pie is fantastically easy to make, delicious and no oven required (depending on one little thing which you’ll find out about later)! No-bake are always good ones when it comes to saving electricity and time without skimping out on an amazing looking dessert. I often read about people finding parts of whatever they are making so delicious they can’t control eating it before it’s ready, this toffee filling is one of those things. I don’t even have a sweet tooth and I was saving every little bit clinging onto the inside of the bowl and spoons I ‘badly’ scraped clean into the pie crust. I’m ashamed to say that there were a lot of those moments. You’ll have lots of those moments too when you make this.

Did I mention it’s fairly easy on a student budget? ALSO if you want, or need it to be gluten free, simply substitute the plain biscuits for the rice biscuits you can buy at any supermarket. You may have to play with butter to biscuit ratio though, let me know if you try it out and what quantities worked for you.

WARNING: Small slices only. This one is massively rich.

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