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Bakewell pudding – comfort food par excellence

Posted on 02-01-2012 | By: admin

Category : Puddings and Pastry

For the second dessert we selected Bakewell Pudding.  This recipe is credited to Emily Malone, a name which is unfamiliar to both me and my mother so unfortunately we can’t determine how old it is or its provenance. Unlike many of the recipes in the box, this one includes a full ingredients list and a fairly comprehensive procedure:

  • 1 pint of breadcrumbs
  • 3 oz. (85g) butter
  • 1 pint of milk
  • 1 pot apricot jam
  • 2 oz. (50g) sugar
  • 4 eggs

Put the bread crumbs into a baking dish, cover it with the jam. Barely melt the butter in a little milk, mix it and the remainder of the milk and sugar with the eggs well beaten. Pour all over the bread and jam to soak through, leaving it to stand 1 and a half hours. Then bake for 3/4 of an hour.

Neither of us had baked anything like this before. It sounded a bit like a bread and butter pudding but without the dried fruit – certainly an improvement in my eyes.

We prepared the breadcrumbs by removing the crusts from a bog-standard white loaf, baking in the oven for 20 mins @ 150 degrees C and blitzing. After that the method was pretty straight-forward.

The result looked unnervingly like a lasagne but was well received by almost everyone – 5 out of 6 people voted it a hit, including someone who professed to hate custard. I think perhaps people were happy to have something edible in front of them after the snowball debacle. Personally I found it a bit too sweet – I think I would have halved the amount of jam – but others disagreed.

Snowballs, but not as you know them!

Posted on 02-01-2012 | By: admin

Category : Puddings and Pastry

Tags: ,

The first attempt at a recipe from the box and it becomes clear that the recipes aren’t entirely comprehensive and that the lack of photographs is quite a disadvantage.  There are also very few people alive who remember eating any of these recipes and a short consultation with my mother reveals very little – she has no memory of said Snowballs.  This recipe comes from Millfield house, probably therefore from my great great grandmother (my great grandmother’s mother-in-law), Helen Priestman Bright Clark.

So we embark on our culinary adventure – Snowballs. The recipe card states:
“Boil a teacupful of rice with a pint and a half of milk.  Flavour with chopped almonds, and sweeten with sifted sugar.  When tender, beat smooth.  Pour into cups which have been rinsed in cold water.  When cold, turn out onto a glass dish and garnish with bright-coloured jelly.  Serve with cream.”

Very specific about how to serve but much less specific about how much sugar and almonds to add, or even what sort of rice to use!  Since it was a pudding we used pudding rice and, as specified used 2oz chopped almonds.  We tried beating with an electric whisk but gave up and used a liquidiser when that didn’t have any effect.  We added 3oz sugar which was sufficiently sweet.

These were served to unsuspecting guests on New Year’s Eve. They were declared a unanimous miss!  Cold and claggy they resembled wall paper paste more than a kind of rice pudding.  The jelly and cream made them more palatable but only marginally so!

In retrospect ground almonds or even dessicated coconut would have been an improvement as the chopped almonds which, though flavoursome, had a slightly odd texture.   Maybe served warm and slightly more liquid (by the time the rice was tender most of the milk had been absorbed and the result was somewhat stiff) they would have been more bearable. The jelly and cream were nice!

Recipe in full (with improvements!):

  • 1 cup (210g) pudding rice
  • 1 1/2 pints of milk (plus more if necessary)
  • 50g ground almonds or dessicated coconut.
  • 85g granulated sugar
  • jelly and cream to serve.

Put milk, rice, sugar and almonds in a pan and simmer till rice is tender (15 mins approximately).  When tender use hand held blender till mixture is smooth, adding milk and heating through if mixture too stiff.  Serve immediately with jelly and cream.