Today is a day to to feel grumpy, and feeling grumpy means chocolate self-saucing pudding. However, I will not be able to make it tonight as I have "prior engagements" i.e. volunteer work and study.
So, in the spirit of chocolate self saucing pudding, here is the recipe most commonly devoured after dinner in my flat, which I made last week:
Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding
For the "cake":
100g melted butter (approximately, we don't have a scale...)
1 cup white sugar, nothing fancy
2 Tbsp cocoa powder (organic dutch is really the best but standard stuff will do the trick)
1 1/3 cup plain flour
4 tsp baking powder
sprinkle of salt
2/3 cup milk
slurp of vanilla essence
For the sauce:
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
4 Tbsp cocoa powder (however I have used 2 in the past when we were low and it seemed to come out fine regardless)
1 1/2 cup boiling water (the original recipe calls for 2 cups but I have found it is too saucy)
Mix the melted butter, sugar and cocoa powder in a large oven proof bowl. You will end up with a dark chocolatey grainy looking mess. Mix in the flour, baking powder and salt until just combined. At this point it will look pretty lumpy and not very well incorporated. Add the milk and vanilla and mix until you get something that looks more like a batter. Don't worry about lumps, the recipe is very forgiving. Until yesterday we didn't have a wooden spoon so I used a dessert spoon for all my mixing, which did the job fine for something like this.
In a jug, mix together the brown sugar, white sugar and cocoa powder. Sprinkle over the top of the batter mix. Pour the boiled water over the back of a large spoon into the bowl.
Place bowl in the oven and bake at 180 degrees C for about 40 minutes. I find when the 40 minutes is up if I remove it from the oven and stick a spoon into it as if I was going to start spooning it out, although the top looks perfectly cooked, it's pretty clear that the cake part is still sticky, so I put it back in the oven for a few more minutes. It's easy to tell the difference between what is undercooked batter and what is just runny sauce, because the batter is much thicker at this point and a lighter brown. My theory is that by making a hole in the top as if you were going to slice a piece of cake, the uncooked mixture underneath gets exposed to the heat more instead of just the top getting more and more cooked with the under section remaining gooey. If you let it stand for a few minutes out of the oven the sauce itself will start to thicken up.
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| Deceptive appearance of being cooked, but just under that "crust" is gooey batter |
I turn on the oven to heat up when I start making the mixture, and from doing that I know that it takes me exactly 12 minutes to get the mix together and by that time the oven has just come to temperature so it's pretty perfect, and there is minimal clean up with only one bowl being used.
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| Final result, served with apricot yoghurt |
