A steamed pudding to start Winter

It’s always nice to have pudding when you have people staying. It seems to make the occasion of eating dinner, more of an event. So most nights while my in-laws have been here, we have had pudding (we ate the TWD tiramisu cake for a couple of nights!). On Wednesday night I made meatballs with a tamarind sauce and pilaf from Bill Granger’s latest book which I treated myself to earlier in the week. I love Bill’s food – it is easy to prepare, simple and fresh, but still has Wow factor. The meatballs were great and the tamarind gave a lovely sharpness to the sauce.

I wanted to make something quick for pudding and looking through my recipe box, I spotted a recipe for golden syrup steamed pudding that I had ripped out of a Delicious magazine quite a while ago. The recipe comes from John Burton Race, a celebrity chef who I don’t really know a lot about. It is an incredibly easy recipe to prepare quickly (it took me about 5 minutes max to put it together). If you don’t have golden syrup, you could use treacle or honey. I don’t think I would use molasses as that would be too strong. Golden syrup is a pantry staple in New Zealand though, and golden syrup steamed pudding is a good old kiwi favourite.

I made four individual puddings using this recipe, and I didn’t bother properly steaming the puddings in a bain marie like I would if I had more time. They still worked perfectly.

Golden Syrup Steamed Pudding (adapted from John Burton Race in Delicious Magazine)

4 dsp golden syrup
175g self raising flour
75g butter
50g sugar
Zest of one lemon
1 egg
100ml milk

• Combine sugar, flour and lemon zest. Rub in butter (I find the best way to do this is to grate the butter into the flour).
• Combine the milk and egg and then mix into the butter and flour mixture
• Grease 4 small pudding ramekins and pop a dsp of golden syrup into each. Evenly divide the pudding mixture between the two ramekins. Cover the tops loosely with tin foil.
• Pop on a tray into a pre-heated oven at 180c and bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
• Invert onto serving plates (I slip a pallet knife round them first to loosen) and served with whipped cream or ice cream