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Puddin’ by zylllah

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Now I live in a smallish town. It is true that I can travel down to Nashvegas for exotic ingredients but I rarely go down there unless I can make a day of it and hit a bunch of places at once. Since I’ve had Elke that has become much more difficult. I did not want to skip this month though because I skipped both the baking and cooking challenge last month.  Even though I so rarely get time to do my hobbies these days I had decided that cooking and by that I mean good cooking was the one thing I would keep up even more so than knitting. Love knitting but cooking is much more of an instant gratification thing. Well more instant than the 6 months it can take me to finish a project.

Anyway I started looking at the links provided to find a recipe that fit the challenge and that I thought would actually get eaten since I am married to the most picky eater on the planet and I’m currently *trying* to diet. Eventually I found one that sounded pretty good to me from The Pudding Club:

Ingredients:

120g Unsalted Butter
120g Caster Sugar (I just food processed regular sugar)
120g Self-rising flour (I substituted AP with salt and baking soda)
30g Cocoa Powder (I used Valrhona)
2 Eggs
60g Chocolate Chips

Steps:

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Sift the flour and cocoa together and add with the egg, a little at a time, to the creamed mixture, beating well between each addition. Finally, stir in half the chocolate chips. Place a covering of the remaining chocolate chips over the base of a greased 1.1 litre pudding before adding the mixture. Steam for 1 ½ hours.

Puddin"

Review:

This is the second time I have used this particular cocoa powder and I’m just not loving it as much as I should for what it costs. I find it tastes slightly over roasted almost.  The first time was for Keller’s brownie recipe and I thought maybe it just was the recipe but no this time also it tasted too roasted. Also I think I might have overcooked it a bit. The toppings I slathered on it were tasty but overall…meh. It wasn’t quite mindblowing enough for me to make again. This is totally my fault though and not the fault of the Host. I am quite glad to have the steaming idea firmly in hand, I can see using it for other cakes. It would be interesting to try a sort of cheesecake cooked that way since it’s not that different than a water bath.