The World's Greatest Puddings

Well, that's arguable. Lemon delicious is top, without any doubt, and I won't take arguments! But what's next? Sticky date? Sussex Pond? Christmas? Marmalade roly-poly? Spotted dick? Self-saucing chocolate is a fine candidate, and it even seems to be an Australian invention. Last weekend and the previous one we had a friend round for a casual dinner, and I made puddings.

The self-saucing chocolate pudding didn't come out perfectly. I found a recipe on Taste.com that had a different technique than my old recipe, and I tried that with my recipe's ingredients. The more modern one has you melt the butter, rather than rub it in. It came out a bit too fluffy - it fell apart - and with not enough sauce. So I'll give you my old recipe instead.

Recipe 1: Self-saucing Chocolate Pudding
1 cup self-raising flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
75g butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup boiling water

Beat eggs together in a cup.
Cream butter and half of the sugar.
Slowly add in eggs
Sift flour and half of the cocoa together.
Fold flour/cocoa mix into the butter/sugar/egg mixture, adding milk and vanilla as you go to keep the mixture soft.
Turn into buttered baking dish.
Sprinkle over the remaining half cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of (sifted) cocoa.
Pour over boiling water.
Bake at 180C for 30-40 minutes.

Notes: Serve with vanilla icecream, or plain pouring cream. I used a couple of nips of that vanilla vodka, and correspondingly less water. And I think I needed to reduce my oven temperature a bit. My oven is very fast, even without the fan setting on.

And now for the lemon pudding - this was good. Very good. The top is maybe a tiny bit browner than I'd wish, so perhaps I should have reduced heat a little. But it's light and fluffy and there's plenty of sauce. It doesn't really need any icecream or cream, it's fine all by itself.

Recipe 1: Lemon Delicious Pudding
1 oz butter (30g)
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind
2 tablespoons plain flour
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup milk
small pinch salt

Cream butter and sugar together.
Gradually beat in egg yolks and lemon rind.
Fold in flour.
Mix in lemon juice.
Slowly add milk.
Whisk eggwhites stiff with the salt.
Fold eggwhites through.
Pour into pudding dish.
Place dish in baking pan of water, and bake at 175C for 45 minutes.

Notes: Do not be alarmed that the mixture is very liquid. This serves 4, or as we did, 3 generously. You could serve with vanilla icecream, cream, or better yet, some of that Maggie Beer lemon and orange curd. But it's fine just as it comes.