By their Traybakes ye shall know them…

It was on Slugger O’Toole that I first twigged there was “a thing” about Protestants and traybakes. I honestly had no idea until I came across the jokes here.

Since then, it has been thrown at me now and then in good humour, and the banter led me to realise that some people have no idea what a Top Hat is?! Turns out they just knew them as “wee marshmallow things”. I laughed at that!

I have so many memories of making traybakes with my mum, both for visitors and for church events. Many were not made in a tray or baked in the oven, despite the name. We had no TV for religious reasons (quite unusual in the 80s and 90s), and as well as church on Sunday, Saturday night visiting was a regular thing. There was an unspoken rule that all visitors had to be offered tea and a little spread, even if they just popped in for a few minutes. It was part of a whole culture of hospitality, and for my mum’s generation, that often meant pulling out a tin of traybakes at short notice.

Our church did not have a proper hall for quite a few years, only a small kitchen, and I remember the neat white cardboard boxes waiting under every seat before the start of special meetings and conventions. Each one usually held three neat triangular sandwiches and two traybakes, so at the end, just the tea needed to be poured. As children, this was often a welcome distraction from the sermon. We would sit there wondering what was in our box and whether we might need to do a bit of swapping. If I opened mine and found raisins, almonds or marzipan, my heart would sink.

I was telling a friend about the cardboard boxes in our church, he was amazed and laughed that all he ever got at Mass was a wafer.

Of all the traybakes, the one that seems to have stood the test of time best is the Fifteen. They are a firm favourite and can even be found in fancy hipster cafés. For me, they are the perfect thing to slip into a rucksack for a day hike in the great outdoors. When the legs start to protest, there is nothing better than pulling out a Fifteen to enjoy with a cup poured from the flask.

I also have very firm views on how a Fifteen should be made. Small marshmallows or multi-coloured ones simply will not do. They need to be the big, fluffy pink and white Princess Mallows, because when you cut them, the sticky edges hold everything together. That, to me, is the mark of a proper Fifteen.

For other people, it’s all about caramel squares, or millionaire’s shortbread, depending on what you call them. The list of traybakes is long, and some have almost slipped from memory. My own favourite was Pineapple Delights. I haven’t had one in years, and writing this prompted me to ask my mum for the recipe. The one in her old book of recipes turned out to contain raw egg, which feels faintly alarming now but was completely normal at the time.

It was always the women who made them. The men just ate them. My husband’s mum, now in her eighties, makes excellent traybakes and has been making them for Masonic meetings for many decades. She still does today, laughing that women today would never do what she was expected to, even though she never complained.

Nowadays, most traybakes are shop-bought. Wrapped in plastic, full of additives, and made to last far longer than anything homemade ever should. Just a waste of calories beside the real thing. I do not recall brownies at all as a child. They arrived later as an American import, but to me, brownies are really a dessert and are best served warm with cream.

Traybakes may get joked about as a Protestant thing, but really, they are more of a northern Irish thing. I know some people like to argue about whether northern Irish is even a proper identity, but we can argue about identity another day.

For now, let’s talk traybakes!

So what about you? Which traybakes take you back, and which ones do you still hope to spot in a café? And when it comes to shop-bought, are they ever worth it, or do you give them a miss like I do?

Originally from Co. Armagh.