Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Food & Drink => Topic started by: citoyen on 03 January, 2021, 08:23:50 pm
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This evening, I made sticky toffee pudding. I'd recently acquired a jar of Cartmel sticky toffee sauce (http://cartmel sticky toffee sauce) so it seemed like a good excuse to use it.
After trawling the internet for recipes, I settled on version 2 from this page - not least because it seemed very easy:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/feb/17/recipes.foodanddrink
(Instead of making two quantities of sauce, I replaced the second 'extra sauce' quantity with the stuff from the jar. The one I made myself was much nicer, of course. Only other difference was that I used dark muscovado instead of molasses sugar, because that's what we had in the cupboard. Recipe says it serves 6 but I don't think you'd go hungry if you stretched it to 8 portions.)
I've never been a huge fan of STP - too often in my experience it is heavy, stodgy, claggy and unbearably sweet. But this was an absolute revelation. The real surprise was just how astonishingly light the sponge turned out. And although it was incredibly rich, it didn't actually taste too sweet. Maybe it's just that I've never had a good STP before today (even though I did once stay at Sharrow Bay).
I had thought of making some vanilla ice cream to go with it but that seemed like too much effort, so I just whipped up the cream instead and placed a dollop on top of the pud.
Consider me an STP convert.
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I like STP but partner Does Not Like Dates so we live without...
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I like STP but partner Does Not Like Dates so we live without...
Shame! I'm not a huge fan of dates myself, but you can't really taste them in the pud - or at least not distinctly. They mainly add texture and sweetness, I think.
Very good source of dietary fibre, of course.
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I make the best STP. Our first internet page (which we had in those days) had a STP rating page. Would have to dig out my recipe but doesn't seem too far away from those.
Important things to note from a one time self styled STP aficionado:
1. Ginger sponge covered in toffee sauce is NOT STP.
2. You need to heat the sponge up in the oven while it's enrobed in the sauce, so that the sponge absorbs sauce. Hot sponge with hot sauce poured on the top is shit.
3. No fucking custard. Ice cream or cream if you wish.
That is all. The trash heap has spoken, ner.
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I make the best STP. Our first internet page (which we had in those days) had a STP rating page. Would have to dig out my recipe but doesn't seem too far away from those.
Important things to note from a one time self styled STP aficionado:
1. Ginger sponge covered in toffee sauce is NOT STP.
2. You need to heat the sponge up in the oven while it's enrobed in the sauce, so that the sponge absorbs sauce. Hot sponge with hot sauce poured on the top is shit.
3. No fucking custard. Ice cream or cream if you wish.
That is all. The trash heap has spoken, ner.
I am totally on board with all three points! I did consider making custard to go with it but thought better of it. Cream is good, but a dollop of good vanilla ice cream (English style, not ‘gelato’) would be the ideal accompaniment for me.
I might try Felicity Cloake’s version next time - although I’m not convinced it needs the addition of nuts:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/apr/14/cook-perfect-sticky-toffee-pudding
She complains that Simon Hopkinson‘s version loses the texture of the dates, but he does say in his recipe not to over-blitz them. (I used a stick blender and only whizzed it until the ingredients were well mixed, not totally puréed.)
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I will dig out my recipe tomorrow. There is no blending of dates required though, they just seem to disintegrate quite nicely on their own. :P
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I make my STP with date paste (https://www.greenweez.com/direct-producteurs-fruit-secs-pate-de-dattes-de-tunisie-500g-p80095?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1ufX5NKF7gIVFoXVCh04NwJaEAQYASABEgK-pfD_BwE), which is a great time saver! I don't know where to buy this in the UK, but I would be very surprised if it cannot be found somewhere.
I will not claim that my STP is the best in the world, but judging by the short time it takes to finish the last bit, it is probably not bad!
A
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I realised that as I ate a mini Christmas pud the other day that I don't eat puddings or deserts and given this year*, the last pudding I ate was the same kind of festively fruity micro-bolus in late 2019.
I don't think I've had a sticky toffee pudding since school. I didn't even know it featured dates. I thought it was just a swiss roll with toffee poured over and then incarcerated in proper British custard.
*very occasionally I have dessert in restaurants, but I'm mostly the person who eats all the bread and asks for more bread before he starts. And don't get me going on restaurants that don't supply bread. And it should be free. Many murders have been justified by lesser crimes. This is one thing the French hold over us. Fresh, free bread.
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INGREDIENTS
6 oz dates, half a pint of water
1 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2oz butter
6 ozs caster sugar
2 eggs
6oz self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
Grease 7" square cake tin. Pour 1/2 pint water over the dates and bring to the boil then remove pan from heat. Add bicarb and leave to stand. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs a little at a time and beat well. Carefully fold in flour. Then stir in the dates with the liquid and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence. Pour into tin and bake in centre of oven @ 180C for 30-40 minutes.
SAUCE
2 oz soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons double cream
2.25 oz butter
1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence
(This is about a third of the original amounts but assumes you don't want to eat the whole thing at once, so scale it back up if you do!)
Mix the sugar cream, butter and vanilla essence together in a pan. Bring to the boil then simmer for 3 mins. Pour a little of the sauce over the cooked pudding then put it back into the oven for a few minutes to allow sauce to soak in & bubble. Shove in face.
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Are you sure you can't just melt Caramac bars over a swiss roll?
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Burn the heretic!
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It's true. I forgot the Birds custard.
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I had a rather nice STP in the company of Keith & Ann Benton at The Golden Lion in Northallerton.
I suppose that's 14 months ago.
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INGREDIENTS...
Thanks. That looks very similar to the 'original' version.
One question: do you put the dates in whole or chop them?
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Dates=prunes with hair in.
I'm not a fan of STP. Why bother. I'd rather have a treacle pudding, if you're going to eat sticky, eat sticky.
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I think I may be muddling my puddings. Are treacle puddings the one that comes in cans that you're supposed to boil forever with dire warnings that if they explode they'll take out an entire city block? I like my puddings with a bit of risk. A genuine unexploded bombe, that sort of thing.
Those were a lovely part of my childhood. Golden syrup puds too. You always risk third-degree mouth burns, of course, as the syrup/treacle component was the same temperature as molten magma.
I don't think I ever understood that puddings could exist independent of their cans.
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INGREDIENTS...
Thanks. That looks very similar to the 'original' version.
One question: do you put the dates in whole or chop them?
I think in the days I used to make this I used those dates that come compressed into a brick (think the size of a packet of butter, do they even exist anymore?) so they needed a bit of picking apart/prodding/muddling
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@ian canned syrup sponge is wrong.
That's what pressure cookers are for. Having said that, the one time I made it I decided my mum never put enough syrup in, so I used a metric fuckton and then ate half the pudding in one sitting. Then spent the next hour climbing the walls and grinding my teeth...
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According to the Guardian articles I referenced earlier, treacle sponge is a classic English steamed pudding while STP is originally from Leftpondia and is more like what they call a muffin in texture.
Steamed puddings can be a bit heavy in my experience, but that's probably down to how they're cooked. I'm vaguely aware of the canned versions but not sure I've ever had one. The STP I made the other day was surprisingly light.
I think both have their place.
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INGREDIENTS
6 oz dates, half a pint of water
1 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2oz butter
6 ozs caster sugar
2 eggs
6oz self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
Grease 7" square cake tin. Pour 1/2 pint water over the dates and bring to the boil then remove pan from heat. Add bicarb and leave to stand. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs a little at a time and beat well. Carefully fold in flour. Then stir in the dates with the liquid and ½ teaspoon vanilla essence. Pour into tin and bake in centre of oven @ 180C for 30-40 minutes.
SAUCE
2 oz soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons double cream
2.25 oz butter
1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence
(This is about a third of the original amounts but assumes you don't want to eat the whole thing at once, so scale it back up if you do!)
Mix the sugar cream, butter and vanilla essence together in a pan. Bring to the boil then simmer for 3 mins. Pour a little of the sauce over the cooked pudding then put it back into the oven for a few minutes to allow sauce to soak in & bubble. Shove in face.
Now I need a wheeze to bring this to MrsT's attention so that she can make one surreptitiously for my birthday (upcoming), this idea being that if I don't know she's making it I can say "I'm really not supposed to eat this, but since you've made it..." with a clear conscience. I just hope the weather will be suitable for doing a sufficient number of km after to use up the carb load.
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According to the Guardian articles I referenced earlier, treacle sponge is a classic English steamed pudding while STP is originally from Leftpondia and is more like what they call a muffin in texture.
Steamed puddings can be a bit heavy in my experience, but that's probably down to how they're cooked. I'm vaguely aware of the canned versions but not sure I've ever had one. The STP I made the other day was surprisingly light.
I think both have their place.
We always used to have a can of sponge pudding in the cupboard when I was growing up. It was only ever consumed on very special occasions and it was partitioned the usual way: my dad got half, I got a quarter and my sister got a quarter. My mother has rarely ever eaten. This was always the grand disappointment of that other canned glory of my childhood, the Fray Bentos pie. The paltry quarter, if that, my dad's share took half the remaining filling too. It was, at least, better than my mother's meat and potato pie in which the meat was basically undissolved lumps of bisto.
Anyway, I mostly ate pudding at school. I can't remember the details, I think there was a lot of Manchester tart (if I recall, pasty smeared with raspberry jam under an adipose layer of cold congealed custard and sprinkled with that recognized signature of Manchester, a dandruff of desiccated coconut. Possibly random fruit crumbles in which the race was to get crumbly crumble – not the second sitting smush.
Bananas in custard. I think bananas in custard was main dessert I ever had at home. Until the time my mum was chased by a tarantula, after that bananas were off the menu, and we resorted to Angel Delight, a dessert option never knowingly threatened by the appearance of large spiders.
I don't especially like sweet things, they make me a bit sick and cranky. Even when I have dessert, a few spoons in, I'm mostly starting to regret it. I once ate a giant ice cream in Chicago, and it came back up fifteen minutes later as I walked down the street. Trying to stop a very public barf, I clamped my mouth shut so it took the path of least resistance and came out of my nose. I was like a human ice cream truck. Could have filled two cornets simultaneously. If I could have rotated my head three-hundred and sixty degrees, I could have been a Dairy Queen Linda Blair.
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Having been brought up in Kent, the bane of my life school dinners wise was gypsy tart. I only discovered later in life that this was a local delicacy, and people who grew up outside Kent were mostly spared this monstrosity. I think the filling is basically a mixture of molasses and evaporated milk. :sick:
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I think I may be muddling my puddings. Are treacle puddings the one that comes in cans that you're supposed to boil forever with dire warnings that if they explode they'll take out an entire city block? I like my puddings with a bit of risk. A genuine unexploded bombe, that sort of thing.
Those were a lovely part of my childhood. Golden syrup puds too. You always risk third-degree mouth burns, of course, as the syrup/treacle component was the same temperature as molten magma.
I don't think I ever understood that puddings could exist independent of their cans.
Syrup sponge came in a can from Sainsbury's until they were discontinued.
I warmed them quickly and safely in the microwave after opening the tin at both ends, as per the instructions.
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INGREDIENTS...
Thanks. That looks very similar to the 'original' version.
One question: do you put the dates in whole or chop them?
I think in the days I used to make this I used those dates that come compressed into a brick (think the size of a packet of butter, do they even exist anymore?) so they needed a bit of picking apart/prodding/muddling
Date bricks still exist but I eschew as Partner Dislikes.
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They sell golden syrup puddings in the shop across the road from my home.
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I'm pretty sure there was no microwave when I was growing up. There might have been a danger that the rays made food a bit foreign. I think my parents have one now, they're getting recklessly exotic in their old age. We did have a soda stream though.
The tarantula thing was real (it might have been a bird-eating spider). It leapt out of a box of Fyffes' finest at her. Or rather, I suspect, it woke up and thought fuck, where? The east-fucking-midlands? Nooooooo. Kill me now. I think it got its wish. Trust me, the people around there are no more welcoming to immigrants even now.
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They sell golden syrup puddings in the shop across the road from my home.
Sainsbury's Basics tinned syrup sponge was CHEAP.
Sainsbury's sell some pricy sponge puddings in plastic basins. I wont pay about £1 per portion to generate plastic waste, when I can throw stuff together for ¼ the price in the microwave.
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My micro-chrimbo pud came in a little plastic thing. Thirty seconds in the microwave. The internet tells me Mr Kipling does plastic puddings now. The proper ones were (and are) Heinz.
I spent a lot of my life thinking Mr Kipling was a really a cake oligarch and occasional dabbler in the written word. Don't knock it, Captain Birdseye was real.
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Sainsbo's Christmas puddings come in plastic pots and are microwavable.
I ordered one but it was unavailable by the time I had my solstice delivery.
We survived a Christmas without a Christmas pudding.
We had pies and iced fruit cake though.
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My micro-chrimbo pud came in a little plastic thing. Thirty seconds in the microwave. The internet tells me Mr Kipling does plastic puddings now. The proper ones were (and are) Heinz.
Heinz stopped making tinned steamed puddings about five years ago. I went looking for one last year and found out this unfortunate situation :(
My Grandma used to make proper home made ones which were fantastic. My Mum always gave us the Heinz ones.
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My micro-chrimbo pud came in a little plastic thing. Thirty seconds in the microwave. The internet tells me Mr Kipling does plastic puddings now. The proper ones were (and are) Heinz.
Heinz stopped making tinned steamed puddings about five years ago. I went looking for one last year and found out this unfortunate situation :(
My Grandma used to make proper home made ones which were fantastic. My Mum always gave us the Heinz ones.
I come from a family that doesn't really cook* so my childhood came out of cans and packets. I am disappointed the great can of sponge pudding has gone over to the plastic side.
In another addition to my tiny little Christmas, I had a tiny Christmas cake too. About the size of a Mr Kipling French Fancy (always a source of familial strife, absolutely no one wants the pink ones). I could have eaten a bigger one, while I'm generally not a fan of the sweet, I do struggle with an addiction to marzipan.
*my grandparents used to boil. I think they started the veg for Sunday lunch on Thursday evening. It was always a toss-up whether the stuff in the pan on the hob was cabbage or snotty hankies. I am not sure you could taste the difference.
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Having been brought up in Kent, the bane of my life school dinners wise was gypsy tart. I only discovered later in life that this was a local delicacy, and people who grew up outside Kent were mostly spared this monstrosity. I think the filling is basically a mixture of molasses and evaporated milk. :sick:
ditto, and yes, truly horrible
I did find a recipe for it once and it sounded somewhat different. I wasn't tempted to try making it though
I'd never realised that STP has dates in it, I should read the ingredients one day. But then I've mainly had the ready-made Cartmel Priory version, available in Booths and Waitrose
Which reminds me, I was gifted a jar of chocolate sauce, must find a use.