Sugar High Friday - Dark Chocolate and Cherry Steamed Pudding
January 21, 2007 at 11:13 AM
by Ashleigh
Dark Chocolate and Cherry Steamed PuddingDavid Lebovitz is hosting Sugar High Friday #27 this week, and one is meant to showcase one's favourite brand of chocolate.
Seeing as I am both an avid fan of David *and* of chocolate I felt I had to play too. So I got myself ready to make something chocolatey and gorgeous, but then stumbled when it came to the chocolate choice.
Truth is, we are spoiled for choice here in the Netherlands. Most often when I bake with chocolate I use Swiss Noir 72% which I can buy in the supermarket. If I'm near a Parti branch, which is likely if my recipe uses nuts, then I'll just buy a huge chunk of Callebaut from their 'seconds' bin. If I am in the natuurwinkel (which is at least once a week), then it has to be Green and Black's.
Seeing as my chocolate buying trip coincided with the natuurwinkel, Green and Black's it was. Then the choice of what to make.
Should it be a cake, brownies, cookies, pudding, tart, pastry, pie, ice cream? Decisions decisions! The storm that started blowing Holland apart helped me decide.
Of course, we needed a steamed pudding.
How English, how traditional, how warming. I turned to Annette Kesler's Learn to Cook Book (no longer in print) and her stellar instructions for a Dark Chocolate and Cherry Steamed Pudding.
Dark Chocolate and Cherry Steamed Pudding
Serves 8 (makes 2 x 1 litre pudding bowls or 1 x 2l)
160g butter
200g sugar
2 extra large eggs
350g cake flour
pinch of salt
10 ml (2 tsp) baking powder
10 ml (2 tsp) vanilla essence
230 ml (1 scant cup) milk
1 x 425g jar pitted cherries, drained
100g dark chocolate of your choice, broken into chunks
- Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy with an electric mixer.
- Break the eggs into the mixture one at a time and beat throroughly,
- Add the vanilla essence to the milk and add the milk mixture and the flour, baking powder and salt alternatively to the sugar, butter and egg mixture. I actually just add it all at once, but I'm sure some purists would disagree with my method!
- Place large spoonfuls of the mixture into the buttered pudding bowls. Add small spoonfuls of chocolate and cherries alternately with the rest of the pudding mixture until it has all been used. I quite like adding a big spoonful of cherries at the bottom with a little of their juice, then the pudding sort of self-sauces.
- Cover the mould with a double thickness of foil, making a pleat in the centre to allow for expansion during steaming. Tie a string tightly around the rim. I just use a rubber band here. Place the pudding bowl on a trivet in a large saucepan and add enough water to the saucepan to come up to just slightly more than halfway up the sides of the mould. Cover the pot with a lid.
- Steam the pudding, covered over high heat until the steam begins to escape, then reduce the heat to medium and continue steaming for about two hours. I'm too lazy to watch a steaming pot, so instead of leaving the pot on the stovetop to steam, I heat the oven to 180C and transfer the covered pot to the oven for the remaining time. It works perfectly.
- Remove the mould from the saucepan and set it aside for 5 - 8 minutes to settle. Loosen the pudding by running a knife around the edge of the bowl, then allow to stand in a warm place until ready to serve.
- Serve with cream or custard. I like it with hot custard, if it has cooled down or with ice cream if it's still very warm or just with cream, which is how we had it.
When I made this pudding I decided to see if using the pressure cooker saved any time in steaming a pudding at all. It doesn't. Absolute waste of time!
Even if the steam is superheated it doesn't seem to make any difference to the length of time the pudding needs to cook. The texture of the pudding cooked in the pressure cooker was slightly gluey and the pudding done in the steam bath in the oven was perfectly moist and supple in comparison. I wouldn't attempt this again in the pressure cooker but it was a fun experiment!
Joe, my youngest son, was not too captivated by the dark chocolate. Sebastian liked it, but his palate, at almost 7 years old, is more mature than his 4 year old brother's. I would use milk chocolate if I made this again for the family.
The picture of my pudding doesn't do it justice at all, but I'll offer the excuse that it's incredibly difficult to photograph a steamed pudding and that we were all so anxious to eat it that I could only take a couple of pictures before it disappeared!
Comments
Hey, you're home??? You're cooking? When Niek remembered to tell me (very late last night)you'd called yesterday, I assumed you'd rung me up from the hospital or something.
I've never had a steamed pudding. They've always seemed kind of ... weird to me. Is it really a pudding, or a cake?
Looks delicious. This is the second time I've come across Sugar High Friday, and next week I really must participate (in fact I did unwittingly, I made chocolate muffins with buttercream icing, and a lemon drizzle cake) but next time I will remember to photograph and post!
Hey Ash,
Thanks for sharing that recipe. I love steamed puddings, although it's been ages since I took the time to make one.
I have a lovely low-fat lemon pudding cake recipe I'd like to share with you. The layers separate during baking - a tart, sweet pudding on the bottom and a light spongy cake on top. You'd never guess it was low-fat from the luscious taste, and it's especially nice served with fresh berries.
Serves 6
1/2 cup unbleached flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons freshly grated lemon peel
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
4 egg whites
pinch of salt
Equipment: eight single portion ramekins or oven proof dessert cups, a flat bottomed baking pan, electric mixer
Preheat the oven to 180C. Lightly oil the ramekins and place them in the baking pan.
In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and 3/4 cups of the sugar. Stir in the buttermilk, lemon juice, the grated peel, and the eggs yolks and set aside.
With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites and salt until the whites are stiff. Beat in the remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter. Spoon the batter evenly into the prepared ramekins. Pour boiling water into the baking pan to reach 1/2 way up the sides of the ramekins.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until puffy and golden and serve with fresh berries.
Contains 229 calories and 2.6 grams of fat per serving.
(From the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts)
Sound delicious!!
Hi Ash,
firstly thanks so much for visiting my blog and for the lovely comments you left.
Your pudding looks utterly divine, I want to dive right in...yum! Yum!
I soooo want to eat steamed pudding!!! Tomorrow during lunch I'm going to buy a pudding basin from the kitchen store near my work. Then I'm going home to make my first steamed pudding, wish me luck!
This is gorgeous and the photo is sinful! You absolutely HAVE to join us for World Nutella Day. I know whatever you would do would be incredible!!!
What a great looking dessert! Perfect for SHF. Great photo!
I've never made a steamed pudding...this looks better than fabulous.
I don't know if I could wait for it to be photographed before diving in either...yummy entry for the event, thanks Ashleigh!
January 21, 2007 12:30 PM