The KitchenMaid

Who wants some old-fashioned self-saucing chocolate and raspberry pudding?

In the depths of winter, one dessert reigns supreme in my household. On a dark, wet night (or even a gloomy afternoon with a chill in the air), one of us will generally say to the other, ‘I think it’s a night for chocolate pudding’.

They’re usually right – not much compares to digging a spoon into a molten puddle of old-fashioned self-saucing chocolate pudding in times of woe and bad weather (even if you have to make it yourself). It’s even better eaten as breakfast the next day. Here’s how to treat your whanau to a nostalgic treat that pushes all the right buttons.

CHOCOLATE AND RASPBERRY SELF-SAUCING CHOCOLATE PUDDING

Serves 4-8

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 35 minutes

This makes a generous amount, but there’s really no point in making less. Some tips for beginners:

  1. Make sure you use a large ovenproof dish, because nothing kills the ‘we’re having self-saucing chocolate pudding’ vibe more than having to scrape burnt pudding off the bottom of the oven.
  2. To change it up, omit the raspberries and add 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes to the dry ingredients for a slightly Mexican-ish hint of spice.
  3. Add some roughly chopped dark chocolate to the batter – say, 125g? – and the finely grated zest of an orange to the batter.
  4. No raspberries? No problem. Leave them out, or subsitute some chopped prunes that you’ve soaked in rum or brandy.
  5. Need to make it dairy-free? Use a butter substitute and a plant-based milk.
  • 75g unsalted butter
  • 1 cup caster sugar
  • ½ cup cocoa
  • 1 ½ cups plain flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¾ cup milk 
  • 1 cup frozen raspberries
  • For the sauce:
  • ¾ cup lightly packed brown sugar
  • 4 Tablespoons cocoa
  • 2 ½ cups boiling water (or use 1 ½ cups boiling water, 1 cup freshly made coffee)

Heat the oven to 180C and lightly grease a large ovenproof dish.

Melt the butter in a large pot. Remove from the heat and add the sugar. Sift over the cocoa, flour, baking powder and salt, then stir in the milk and raspberries until well mixed. Scrape into the greased dish.

Sprinkle over the brown sugar and cocoa, then pour the boiling water over the top. Bake for 35 minutes, until the pudding has risen and feels springy to touch.

Let stand for five minutes before serving to allow the sauce to thicken. Serve with vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream (or both!). Leftovers can be eaten cold from the fridge or reheated in a low oven.

Black Doris plum and coconut clafoutis

How familiar are you with the collected works of Enid Blyton? If you’re considering choosing the English writing powerhouse as a Mastermind topic, I’d think again. She churned out hundreds and hundreds of books, short stories and other pieces during her lifetime – that’s a lot of Faraway Trees, Naughtiest Girls and Famous Fives, among others. Wikipedia says she’s the seventh-best-selling fiction author of all time, with an estimated 600 million copies sold. (In case you still want to refresh your memory, the Enid Blyton Society should be able to answer your every query.)

Black Doris clafoutis

Many of her works seem hopelessly outdated now, reflecting the morals (and quite frankly, sexist and racist attitudes) of another time, but they still capture children’s imaginations with their adult-free adventures. Most recently I’ve been reacquainting myself with the boarding school stories (the St Clares’ and Malory Towers series’), in which midnight feasts, pranks and being sent to Coventry all feature frequently.

The midnight feasts all involve secret stashes of tinned goodies like condensed milk, pineapple and sardines (sometimes eaten together, such is the desperate creativity of the boarding school pupil) and bottles of ‘pop’. I’m not sure I could stay awake long enough for a midnight feast these days but if I was planning one based on tinned food I’d make sure to include Black Doris plums. Can’t you imagine slurping them down with a splash of condensed milk, perhaps with a slice of ginger cake from Janet’s aunt?

If your tastes are somewhat more adult and respectable, you might like to try the plums in this pudding. A clafoutis is a simple French pudding, traditionally made with cherries. I won’t tell them that we’re bending the rules if you don’t.

BLACK DORIS PLUM AND COCONUT CLAFOUTIS

It should go without saying that any leftovers are delicious cold for breakfast. If you like, reserve the syrup and heat it up to pour over the finished pudding when serving.

  • 1 x 800g tin Black Doris plums, drained and stones removed
  • 2 eggs
  • ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 Tablespoons caster sugar
  • 1/3 cup plain flour
  • ½ teaspoon ground cardamom
  • 1 cup coconut cream (I use the Ayam brand, which comes in a 270g tin)
  • 50g white chocolate, roughly chopped (optional)
  • Icing sugar, for dusting

Heat the oven to 180C. Grease a shallow ovenproof dish (like a 25cm enamel pie plate) and set aside.

Put the eggs, vanilla, sugar, flour and coconut cream in a bowl. Whisk until smooth and pour into the prepared dish. Push the plums down into the batter and scatter over the white chocolate (if using).

Bake for 30 minutes, or until golden and set in the middle. Leave for five minutes, then dust with icing sugar and serve in wedges with a dollop of coconut yoghurt or cream.

Instant gin and lemon fools

Goodness knows the world could use a few laughs right now, but this recipe is no joke. It’s what you make when you suddenly realise you have people coming for dinner and you need to whip up some sort of small, elegant pudding that will round out the night nicely. These almost-instant fools are the answer.

Having spent a somewhat gin-soaked summer – I got three bottles of the good stuff for Christmas (one of them was a miniature, before you plan an intervention) – I’ve been enjoying finding different ways to use them. Mostly we’ve drunk them neat or with a little ice, especially the Little Biddy West Coast Botanical Gin from Reefton Distilling Co and Bloody Shiraz Gin from Four Pillars Gin in the Yarra Valley. The latter is also really good to sip while you’re nibbling squares of very dark chocolate (sensitive souls will need to brace themselves for the resulting headache the next morning).

These little fools, however, I made with the contents of the miniature – Malfy Lemon Gin from Italy. You could use any gin, really, but once you’ve tasted the craft variety the standard gins seem a little rough around the edges. If you’ve got lemon curd stashed away (here’s a super-easy recipe), this takes minutes to make.

Instant gin and lemon fools

Serves 4

1 cup Greek yoghurt

1/2 cup lemon curd

4 Tbsp gin

50g white chocolate, finely chopped (optional)

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and stir until combined. Divide between four small glasses. Chill for at least 20 minutes before serving with little crisp biscuits (this shortbread would be excellent). Cheers!

Like finding creative ways to use gin? These gin recipes might tickle your fancy…

How to make mascarpone

Ever been at home and experienced a mascarpone emergency? You know, that feeling you get when you really need a tub of thick, luscious cultured cream but you know the corner shop won’t have any and you can’t be bothered going to the supermarket? Well, let me save you. Here’s a dead easy way to make mascarpone at home that doesn’t require faffing about with straining through layers of cheesecloth and other such hassles. This is a two-ingredient wonder that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Homemade mascarpone

There are more recipes for mascarpone than you can shake a stick at – and a lot of argument about which method is better, or more authentic. I’m not interested in wading into that quagmire, especially since I don’t have any claims to knowing the secrets of Italian grandmothers. However, I do know the way my mother used to make it and it works a charm. All you need is a thermometer and a bit of patience.

1 litre cream

1/4 tsp tartaric acid

Pour the cream into a bowl suspended over a pot of simmering water. Heat, stirring occasionally, until the cream reaches 90C. When this happens, add the tartaric acid and stir for 30 seconds. Remove the pot from the heat and stir for another two minutes (at a leisurely pace, don’t work up a sweat), then remove the bowl from the heat and leave to cool to room temperature. Unless you’re in a very warm climate, you can safely leave the cream at room temperature for about four hours. By this time the cream should have thickened considerably. Give it a stir, then cover and put it in the fridge for at least three hours before using – ideally overnight.

I find it thick enough by this point, but you can always strain it through a layer of new cheesecloth or similar if you want the end result to be very thick. The resulting cheese will keep for more than a week in the fridge – but since I can just about eat it straight from the bowl I never have a problem with using it up. If you need more inspiration, there’s this Black Doris and white chocolate tiramisu, this tagliatelle with smoked trout and mascarpone and this breakfast dessert option – raspberries, walnuts and mascarpone on toast.

Last Christmas…

Last week I wrote a ‘best of times, worst of times’ kind of essay on Christmas food (and much more besides) for Your Weekend magazine. I ran out of room to include this section, which looks back at last Christmas. How can it be a year ago?

Coconut Eton Mess with berries and pomegranate molasses

Christmas Day 2016, Wellington

My brother stands in the kitchen, taking the cork out of a bottle of champagne. My sister puts on her glasses to read a recipe on her phone. My husband rinses grit off a pound of West Coast whitebait while my nephew patiently teaches my daughter how to play Old Maid. My brother-in-law explains a complex psychological theory to me while I wrangle two kilos of pork loin into a roasting dish. I have been looking forward to this for months – Christmas under my own roof, with visitors from far away. Not even the discovery that our ancient car was stolen overnight bothers me. I have taken the advice of the kind woman on the insurance helpline who told me at 8am that “there’s nothing we can do about it today, just enjoy Christmas”.

Weeks earlier, I had not felt so good. I had just started a new job and was more unsettled by the Kaikoura earthquake than I wanted to admit. I needed a distraction and the Christmas menu fitted the bill perfectly.  I send emails to my siblings; my brother responds with a link to a Fanny Craddock clip on YouTube. My sister directs me to a Nigella Lawson recipe. I show my husband a photo. “Excellent choice,” he says. “But we’re having a ham too, right? And whitebait?”

In the end we have all of these things, plus new potatoes dug out of the garden on Christmas Eve. My brother makes a kind of Eton Mess with coconut yoghurt, cranberry-studded meringues and swirls of pomegranate molasses. My daughter makes us pose for family portraits with the hideous robotic toys she has been sent for Christmas. We laugh so much the neighbours must think we are mad. We want for nothing.

Later that night I crawl into bed, thinking about the person who stole our car. They broke into our neighbour’s car too, stealing his five-year-old’s brand new bike. I don’t care so much about our car, but I hope the bike has made someone happy.

 

Wherever you are this Christmas, I hope you have a happy and safe one with people you love.