Thursday, June 11, 2009

Chocolate plagiarised(?) pudding - from Lindy

Ben texted me once from somewhere in Victoria when we were still in Tucumán to ask for 'the choc. pudding' recipe. I've also had international phone calls and emails on the subject. It seemed that he never quite got around to writing it out himself.

I have always and only used the PWMU or Women's Weekly 'original' and Ben 'bettered' this by looking up the recipe on line. He then sent me the 'improved' recipe and said that I would find it better than the recipe I always used. He was right. I haven't looked back :-)

I presume these recipes are all public domain and so shall proceed with what must be just as old as Vegemite!

Pudding
60g butter
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup SR flour
3/4 cup castor sugar
1 tablespoon coca

Sift dry pudding ingredients into a mixing bowl or whatever you have... Melt butter in microwave until liquid. Add milk and vanilla to butter. Pour onto the dry ingredients and give them all a belt around with a wooden spoon until the mixture is a nice creamy brown colour. Grease an ovenproof dish; the deeper and narrower means the pudding will have more sauce rather than it drying up.

Topping
3/4 brown sugar (I often use white as I often don't have brown in the cupboard)
1 tablespoon cocoa
2 cups hot water

The topping was Ben's revolutionary change. He said to mix the three ingredients together in a jug until the sugar and cocoa are dissolved in the boiling water and there are no lumps. Pour the liquid over the back of a spoon and onto the uncooked pudding mixture. Make sure your oven is nicely preheated to moderate and put the pudding in. Keep an eye on it but it should be ready in forty minutes or so.  

A challenge...
Perusing my email quickly before sitting to write out this recipe I saw that there might be the beginnings of a Chocolate Pudding Challenge. A dear friend claims that not only does her mother make the best chocolate pudding ever but that this friend herself has worked out how to make a single-serve self-saucing pudding in a mug which cooks in a few minutes in the microwave! The real sting of this challenge is that both mother and daughter are New Zealanders! Are we just going to take this cross-Tasman one-upmanship? Let's hear from those who can better that. And yes, dear NZ friend, we will publish your revolutionary pudding-in-a-mug if you send it to us. Ben would have loved that one.

7 comments:

  1. A friend sent me this 'mug cake' recipe that I'd love to share. I recognise that it isn't a pudding, but it is easy and delicious! :)

    5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
    4 tablespoons flour
    4 tablespoons sugar
    2 tablespoons cocoa
    1 egg
    3 tablespoons milk
    3 tablespoons oil
    3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
    A small splash of vanilla extract
    1 large coffee/soup mug (or 2 teacups)

    Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
    Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.
    Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.
    Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts.
    The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed!
    Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
    EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).

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  2. OK Lindy this is one of my fave's too -I have an excerpt from the GoodWeekend magazine taped above my stove and its very similar.

    If you use wholemeal SR flour you can even pretend its healthy.

    I will try the dissolving trick next time (Pené cooked it this week already so will have to wait a little while) and henceforth this will be known as Ben's chocolate pudding and say a prayer for the Mulherin gang if that's OK (when we have Mexican we pray for the Fletchers - haven't figured out what cuisine we need for the S&J S - let the reader understand).

    Hamish

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  3. Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding in a Mug.
    4 Tablespoons Flour
    1/4 teaspoon baking powder
    1/4 teaspoon vanilla
    1 Tablespoon butter
    1 1/2 teaspoons cocoa
    2 Tablespoons milk
    3 Tablespoons sugar

    melt butter. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar& cocoa in your largest coffee mug.
    Mix melted butter,milk and vanilla. Add liquid mixture to dry ingredients.

    Sauce:
    1 1/2 teaspoon cocoa
    1/4 teaspoon vanilla
    3 Tablespoons sugar
    7 tablespoons of water

    mix together and pour over mixture in mug.
    microwave on medium high for 3 minutes in 1 minute bursts. (Hopefully this will prevent the sauce boiling over....)

    Serve with vanilla ice cream

    It nearly always boils over, but that just gives you an excuse to lick the microwave plate!!
    Lindy your recipe is very similar to my Mum's.

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  4. Who wants to lick the microwave plate? Yuk... But I guess NZ is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

    On the other hand, maybe NZ microwave plates are cleaner than Aussie ones: the one where I work has weeks of built up Bolognese sauce and overflowed soups and exploded eggs and boiled milk and who knows what else!

    PS: A note on trans-Tasman humour: all jokes will be assumed to be in the spirit of mutual appreciation and made with a friendly smile.

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  5. From the sublime to the ridiculous!
    Here are the quantities for about 20, courteousy of my Mum. Use a standard family roasting dish. It has a tendency to overflow so make sure there is plenty of dish above the pudding.

    6 cups flour
    3tbsps cocoa
    3 cups milk
    1 desertspoon vanilla essence
    12 tbsps butter
    4 cups sugar
    6 tsp baking powder

    sift flour and baking powder and cocoa. Add milk, vanilla and melted butter. Mix until smooth and pour into a greased baking dish.

    Sauce
    4 cups sugar
    10 cups boiling water
    3 tbsp cocoa
    1 desertspoon vanilla essence

    Mix together and pour gently over mixture in dish.

    Bake approx 1 hour at 180 C.

    Just in case you want to feed all your friends at once!! I live at college and convinced our cook to make this recipe for us and it has become a favourite here. (One student who will remin annoymous has been known to lick the roasting dish once all the pudding was gone!)My fellow students reguarly ask me to make them pudding in the weekends and the holidays when we have to cook for ourselves. They are quite happy to have a Kiwi made pudding!

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  6. No recipe (a secret) just a Mulherin Story with Ben in the midst ...

    As Pete Mulherin will attest - my microwave chocolate pudding (read bloody fantastic and totally delicious) can occassionally (read most of the time) boil over and one evening, on insistance from the Mulherin fellas (as a focused team you can't budge them really. I think there was even another trip to the supermarket for extra ice-cream) during a "sleepover at Rutherglen", I was encouraged to "make sure there is lots of sauce" so added much sauce ingredients (gosh that's a long sentence, is it a sentence?).

    We all could have eaten from the microwave plate (mine is cleaned occassionally - always zap for an extra 10 minutes, is my theory, if you are going to eat from it directly :-))

    Yuk and what is that supposed to be said the Mulherins (about the boil over rather than eating from the plate)- however there was little left mmmmmmmmmm

    We miss you Ben. We love you Ben.

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  7. What a wonderful way of remembering! We've made the pudding several times now and tonight mid-pudding with the Blairs we paused to pray for you. Looking forward to the next recipe. Cheers, Halfords.

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