Pete Fred

I made this microwave sponge but golden syrup and black treacle may be difficult for you to source. So try the marmalade pudding that's also linked on that page. Anyone interested in traditional methods and recipes should try browsing here and here. There's also a nice selection at BBC Food. BTW, your chocolate cake was most probably Barbara Kafka's Steamed Chocolate Pudding.

Seeing mention of steamed puddings in another thread is all the excuse needed to celebrate these increasingly overlooked delights. I've made a few since the end of summer last year, usually accompanied by a jug of piping hot custard, but occasionally crème fraîche. Brace yourselves for a huge data dump. In no particular order... Lemon sponge. Very lemony. Carrot Cake. I was curious what my regular carrot cake recipe would be like steamed rather than baked. It was a little more moist, but it's already a moist cake and I think better with the baked top and edges. Date pudding. I made a quick toffee sauce to pour over so it was essentially a Sticky Toffee Pudding. Chestnut honey pudding. This was the first time I made it. Made a couple more since. Blueberry pudding. I think the berries were the frozen variety. They go nice and jammy on the top. Chocolate sponge. I find chocolate cakes made with cocoa powder can often be a little dry. But when steamed, they stay soft and moist. Microwave treacle sponge. It's a bit tricky to judge the doneness and not overcook when microwaving, so I prefer to steam. But if you can't be bothered with all the faff, the results are perfectly acceptable and it only takes 5-10 minutes to cook. As well as sponges, I'm also partial to a steamed suet crust pudding... Apple and rhubarb hat. Summer fruit hat. I think this was late season plums, peaches, and necratines. Might be a pear and a few cherries in there, too. I'm not sure why they're called 'hats'. Probably the shape. You slice off the top at the table to reveal the glorious delights within, eliciting ooohs and ahhhhs from the expectant gathered, clutching their spoons, eager to dive in. Brigade pudding. This is apple, raisins, sultanas, treacle, dark sugar, and spices. I happened to make it around Christmas a couple of years ago and it very much reminded me of mince pie filling. So I've now decided to make it a Christmas tradition. Ho ho ho! And finally, possibly the most bonkers of all steamed puddings... Sussex pond pudding. Line a pudding basin with suet pastry then fill it with all the butter and brown sugar within a five mile radius. Poke holes in a lemon and nestle it in the middle. Cover with more pastry and steam for a few hours, during which time the filling transforms into a lemony butterscotch sauce that saturates the suet crust. Serve with more fat in the form of cream (double or, preferably, clotted). Like I said, bonkers.

Today I made macarons au chocolat.... Before getting myself into another fine mess...

Lots of lovely gariguette strawberries at the market this morning so I made a quick almond crumble and some vanilla whipped cream... The only thing missing was sunshine. Summer strawberries seem even more perfect when the sun shines. I waited and waited but it never came. Still tasted great, though.

Agreed. Love poppy seeds. If it's any good I might stash some away in the freezer, but mostly it goes to neighbours. Or sometimes just random people I meet. There's Jean who I pass on the road walking into town and we exchange pleasantries in my ropey French. I saw where he lived one day and now I'll leave an occasional treat on his window ledge if I'm walking by. Another time I got talking to a fella in Aldi who liked my hat; he's sometimes there on a Sunday morning at the same time as me so I'll stick a slice or two in my backpack on the off-chance we cross. There's also the goat cheese lady at the market who used to get a weekly bag of goodies until she went low-carb around Christmas to shed a few pounds. And if I do an odd-job for a friend of a friend then more often than not I'll throw in some cake or cookies just to get shut of the stuff.

Tahini Poppy Seed Pound Cake from King Arthur... It took a long time to bake and was a touch dry but I liked it. There was good sesame flavour from the seed coating. Next time I'll load up the top more with sesame seeds for a bit more of that toasted note.

Access to great butter is not a problem. Brittany, Normandy, and Charentes-Poitou butters are readily available in most supermarkets. For the gâteau breton I used Isigny butter with flaky sea salt crystals (3%). That's really good, especially if you can find the raw cream version. And I use salted butter for pretty much everything, baking included. (Don't get me started on lack of salt in sweet things. I'm gonna get an apron one day that says "Needs More Salt!" 😉) I'm always intrigued when American authors and blogs insist on 'European-style butter' in their recipes. Is the regular stuff over there really noticably inferior? US butter seems to be 80% fat, whereas here it's 82-84%. Or perhaps American dairy cows are grain-fed rather than grass-fed? 🤷‍♂️

Gâteau Breton is easy to throw together. It's just flour, butter, sugar and egg yolks, so it's kinda like a shortbready cake. Obviously the better the butter the better the cake. I've only ever made it with those four ingredients but it's not unusual to have a filling of some kind, most commonly prunes. Aldi had 3% off a bag of Agen prunes (French supermarkets have the weirdest discounts!) so that was excuse enough to give it a try... It was fine but I think it's best when great French salted butter is the star of the show. I'll be going back to basics in future.

I used this Paul Hollywood recipe. You can watch him make it here. I would advise using very soft butter and having all the other ingredients at room temperature so that everything blends well.

I picked up a tin of chestnut purée and tried it a couple of different ways mentioned in David Lebovitz's blog post: paired with some fromage blanc and spread on brioche toast.... It didn't bring much to the cheese party, so I won't bother with that again, but it was nice on toast so I can see myself grabbing another tin at some point. I also made a no-churn ice cream from a Nigella Lawson recipe. It's just the purée mixed with rum (or Armagnac in my case) and folded through sweetened whipped cream. It was OK but nothing special. I tried it with a slice of warm chestnut honey sponge... ...but it was less than the sum of its parts. Away from chestnuts, I made Christina Tosi's Perfect 10 granola bars... These were more of a 5/10 for me. I found them closer to powdery than chewy. But at least I did learn one thing: chocolate chips have no place in this type of confection.

Food of the Gods! Some French supermarkets stock it, but at a considerable mark up. When friends make trips to the UK, I always have them smuggle some back. 🤫 😏

Chestnut honey is the only chestnut-ty thing that's made me swoon*. I've tried the crèmes de marrons, pâtes de marrons, marrons glacés, Mont-Blancs, and any other 'châtaigne' cake or tart on offer, but never been particularly excited by any of them. Having said that, now you've seeded the thought, I think I'll pick up a tin of Clément Faugier tomorrow and follow Mr Lebovitz's advice to simply pair it with fromage blanc or slather it on toast. *One of my absolute favourite combos is fresh goats cheese (from Anne-Marie at the market), a baguette tradition, bien cuite (sadly, the bakery which made the best one in town was closed down by the Health Department because of rats!), and a drizzle of chestnut honey (from the bee lady with the missing tooth).

I was gifted some chestnut honey so put it to good use in a Steamed Honey Pudding... Served with custard, naturally... (And non of your fancy, egg-thickened creme anglaise, either. Just good old-fashioned Bird's custard powder. As it should be.)

Good Lord! 🙇‍♂️

I think there would be another revolution if Brussels poked their nose into French unpasteurized cheese. “From my cold, dead hands” to borrow a phrase. Most supermarkets carry at least a few, and it’s not unusual for even small towns to have a fromagerie with a wide selection. No doubt the bureaucrats will come one day, but I’ll be waiting with a slice of Tomme de Savoie in one hand and a pitchfork in the other. One thing I’ve not been able to get my head around is how popular UHT milk is in France. OK, maybe raw milk is a push for a lot of people, but the preference for sterilized over pasteurized is baffling. Similarly with fresh cream; there’s plenty of cultured crème fraîche, but when it comes to pouring cream the vast majority is the nasty UHT stuff with added stabilizers. It’s also next to impossible to get fresh cream above 30% fat, so whipping by hand today’s batch for the Eton Mess was a helluva workout, let me tell ya!

They sell raw milk in my local supermarket so I was curious to see if it added anything extra to a (orange) créme anglaise. Answer: not that I could tell. Anyway, that needed using up so I tossed yesterday's surplus berries in the rhubarb syrup from last week, and smashed a couple of macaron shells for texture... It was so good I immediately toasted some flaked almonds and went back for seconds... I missed a trick by not adding a couple of segments from the zested orange. Kicking myself about that one. 😒 The only sour note was when turning the plate over after licking it clean... Oops. That's not aged well.

I can neither confirm nor deny reports that I had two of these for lunch... The strawberries were macerated briefly with a sprinkling of sugar and a splash of kirsch (because, hey!, France). I may have to introduce my neighbours to this taste of the old country.

Yeah. The strawberries were really very good... Hmmmm... Eton Mess? It's been a while since I had one of those. That might be tomorrow taken care of. 👍 (Although I don't think I have a sundae glass to do it full justice.)

With the leftover meringue from the macarons, I made some little nests in anticipation of having a go at a pavlova. Then at the market this morning I spotted some rather good local gariguette strawberries, so I picked up some raspberries and blueberries (supermarket, sadly) and macerated everything with some mint and lime juice. I whipped up a rose mascarpone chantilly, et voilà... I think I got a little carried away with the presentation but, in my defence, I had just come off the back of watching the Coronation, so the red, white and blue gaudiness and ridiculous ostentation seems rather appropriate. God Save the King! 😉

Ahhhh, you'd have trouble finding me.... I now live in France! Mais tout le monde est encore le bienvenu 🙂 (Which reminds me, must go and change my profile info.)

Not as cute as @RWood's delightful showstopper, but lemon macarons are always a treat...

I'd never heard of a Dream Bar until yesterday. Luckily I had all the ingredients to hand... The recipe was published in a Nebraskan newspaper nearly ninety years ago but seems to be pretty standard. This adaptation used dark brown sugar and walnuts. It was nice, but I felt it needed something else to round it out; I dunno, maybe just a bit more salt. 🤷‍♂️

It's actually thinner: a mixture of cream cheese, yoghurt, icing sugar and juice. I feared it was too loose and was gonna slide off when cut, but it was fine. (Recipe here.)

Citrus Cake (orange and lemon) by Yasmin Khan... I added some candied orange peel left over from Christmas. It was a pleasant cake and, being a one bowl affair, very easy to make.

I took another run at a Tarte Vaudoise using thicker cream... No noticable difference, so that's good to know. And I was looking for any excuse to use up the syrup left over from poaching the rhubarb last week. One defrosted slice of rhubarb and rosemary cake later...