Magic chocolate pudding

This week I went hunting for a half-remembered recipe - the magic self-saucing pudding. You mix it all up together and while it bakes, the cakey part rises to the top, leaving gooey sauce underneath. My own favourite version of this is the lemon one, best known as lemon delicious. But this time it had to be chocolate for my houseguest, who thinks that if dessert's not chocolate, it's not really dessert. I found exactly what I wanted on page 74 of Alexa Johnston's collection of old-fashioned desserts, What's for Pudding? Just one grumble: why oh why do designers think it's a good idea to put the list of ingredients - and in this case the page numbers as well - in pale coloured type that's really hard to read?

Chocolate fudge pudding (slightly adapted from What's for Pudding)

For the pudding:

1 c (125g) flour

1 tsp baking powder

2 Tbsp cocoa

pinch salt

3/4 c (150g) sugar ("a mixture of brown and white is a good idea")

1/2 c (125g) full-cream milk

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 Tbsp (30g) butter

1 egg, beaten

1/2 c chopped walnuts or chopped chocolate (I used a bar of very dark German chocolate which is too bitter to eat, but wonderful to bake with)

- Preheat oven to 180C. Butter a fairly shallow ovenproof dish that holds about 4 cups (1 litre).

(In fact the dish I used was a bit too shallow - a deeper one, about 8 cm, would let more sauce collect under the cakey top.)

- In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt. Mix through the sugar.

- Melt the butter in a glass jug in the microwave or in a small saucepan. Stir in the milk and vanilla essence.

- Pour onto the dry ingredients, with the beaten egg, and mix until smooth.

- Stir in the walnuts or chocolate.

For the topping:

4 Tbsp cocoa

3/4 c (150g) brown sugar

1 and 1/2 c hot water

- Spread the batter evenly in the ovenproof dish. Sift the cocoa evenly over the top, followed by the brown sugar.

- Pour the hot water carefully over, completely covering the mixture. (The best way to do this is to hold a tablespoon or larger serving spoon over the mixture and pour the hot water slowly and gently into the spoon, moving the spoon around over the mixture, so that the water spreads evenly over it all without displacing it.)

- Bake for about 1 hour until the topping is firm to the touch and the pudding smells cooked. 

The magic at work - that's a macaroni cheese underneath.

As you can see, mine didn't look wonderful, as some of what should have been the sauce stayed stubbornly in the middle of the top (that too-shallow dish was the problem, I think). But there was absolutely nothing wrong with the taste. Alexa says "Serve with cream", but we ate ours with ice-cream - I love the contrast of hot and cold. My guest was ecstatic. With a bit of supervision, children could make this for Mother's Day tomorrow...

 

Bread and butter

Harvey had a tooth out today, so he needed something nourishing, soft and warm (but not hot) to eat for dinner. In the pantry I had a kind of small fluted Italian brioche, called a Pandoro di Verona. I bought it at Caffe Italiano in Cuba Street when they had two for the price of one. So I came up with the idea of using it to make a bread and butter pudding. In the days when Harvey could fit in pudding as well as his main course, it was one of his favourites and he made it very well.

The recipe comes from another book I bought in London in the mid-70s, and used all the time: The Pauper's Cookbook, by Jocasta Innes. It appealed to me because we had two hungry boys, but so little money left over for food after paying rent, etc., and also because it was so down to earth. She wrote it, she said, because "it stood to reason that there must be a good few other people in my situation, trying to conjure good food from limited cash, battered old pots and pans and kitchens more nightmarish than dream." That was me, exactly. You can double this recipe if you have a hungry lot to feed and a wide dish to make it in.

Bread and Butter Pudding
6 thin slices buttered white bread (she recommends cutting the crusts off, but we like the crusty bits, at least on the top layer).
A handful of raisins or sultanas plus (if available) a spoonful of candied peel
2 eggs and 1 yolk
400 ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
sugar

Lightly butter an ovenproof ceramic or glass dish and set the oven to 160C. Cut the bread and butter into quarters or triangles, and arrange in layers in the dish, putting a sprinkling of the dried fruit and a sprinkling of sugar on each layer. Whisk together the eggs and egg yolk in a bowl. Heat the milk a little, add the vanilla essence, and mix it well with the eggs. Pour carefully over the bread and butter. Sprinkle sugar over the top, dot with tiny bits of butter and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

"Like most simple dishes", says Jocasta, "bread and butter pudding needs to be made with care...but don't give in to the temptation to use packed sliced bread unless you want it to taste like wet flannel." This was certainly true of British sliced bread in the 1970s - ours isn't quite that bad. But it does work best with a good white unsliced loaf, and best of all with some kind of brioche or pannetone - only then, of course, it's no longer for paupers.

I'm sorry, you're only getting half a picture because I was intent on feeding it to Harvey and scooped out half of it before I remembered to take a photo. Which is sad, because with the neat round fluted slices, it was the prettiest one I've ever made.