Growing up in Canada, pudding to me meant a beautiful rich, custardy dish made with milk, eggs and flavouring, much like a blanche mange or a mousse, but richer, looser and more milky. (I hope that I described it correctly.) There were three favourite flavours....Chocolate, Vanilla and Butterscotch and I would have a hard time choosing between the three, which one I like the most. It all depends on what kind of mood I am in, but I do have a very good one posted on Recipe Zaar for Butterscotch pudding (recipe#99080). It has a beautiful balance of flavours....salty/sweet with a lucious caramel like texture. It is a real pleaser. Most often than not, in North America, people use store bought mixes to make their puddings with. Quick and easy to make, they really are quite good and you can get both a cooked and an instant version in many flavours including, not only the popular three, but also banana, coconut cream and lemon, to name but a few. You can also buy ready prepared ones these days. In little yoghurt types of tubs, they are an ideal addition to any child's school lunch bag. You just can't beat homemade though, but then homemade anything is always infinitely better!
Over here pudding has a much richer connotation, meaning not just, well.... pudding, but dessert in general! What a wonderful name to give the dessert course...pudding...and what a wealth of delicious puddings you have over here.....Roly Poly Pudding...rich suet dough rolled around sweet rasberry jam and steamed, served up sliced in bowls...it's ruby coloured centre spiral covered in delicious warm and buttery custard....Spotted Dick...same delicious dough studded with raisins and currants...steamed and then sliced in the same way and served up with the same lucious, warm custard, or Creme Anglaise as they call it in France. In North America we are more likely to have our desserts accompanied with Vanilla Ice Cream, but then again, what is Vanilla Ice Cream but ...Frozen Vanilla custard. Who hasn't felt orgasmic about beautifully rich fruit crumbles...their deliciously moist and fruity bottoms, covered in a crisp,buttery and crumbley topping, once again smothered in lashings of hot lucious custard....then again...there is the Bramley Apple pie....at once both tart and sweet...encased in it's rich short crust pastry...there is no finer pie...but I want to wax rhapsodic about Sticky Toffee Pudding.....that is the piece de resistance.....the King of all puddings.....what's not to love about Sticky Toffee Pudding. A beautifully rich cake full of butter and eggs and moist dates.....smothered in a rich, creamy, buttery, toffee sauce...the sauce soaking into the cake and pooling around it...each spoonful sending your tastebuds into a tailspin of lucious flavour you never want to recover from...a love affair from first bite. I also have a delicious recipe for sticky toffee pudding posted (#88020 on www.recipezaar.com) and there are some quite passable ones you can buy in the shops if you are so inclined...but none compare to the ones we discovered this summer up in Cumbria. Produced by the Cartmell Village Shop these puddings are truly the elite of sticky toffee puddings, and I dare anyone to make a finer one by scratch at home....I don't think I could, not without their recipe anyways. It is rich and moist and the toffee sauce is to die for. I discovered them in this little rest stop near where we were staying and I picked one up by chance. It's packaging was quite simple...just a plain tin pan covered with a plain white carboard sleeve with black print and a picture of a small village shop...40 seconds in the microwave and you are in heaven, pure and simple....I was back there every second day during our holiday buying more for us to enjoy in the quiet of the evening....after all it was a holiday! I worried that once we came down south I'd never be able to find it again and I wanted to eat as much of it as I could... while I could.....thankfully I was wrong...you can get it down here! I don't know why I had never noticed it before! I have bought it several times since we came home, having discovered it in my local Waitrose refrigerated pudding section. I had never tasted Sticky Toffee Pudding before I moved over here! How sad was that! Look at what I would have missed out on had I never come here! I can't wait for my children to come over so I can share it with them! In the meantime....it's mine....all mine....
I don't think there is anything that says love more than good old Apple Pie, and I've made quite a few in my lifetime. It seems to be synonomous with all that is good about life and nobody makes it better than anyone's mom. As long as we have been married my husband has been going on about how good his mother's apple pie was. I have tried countless times to make one as good as hers, but have failed time and time again. Apple Pie in Britain I have discovered is a completely different animal than Apple Pie in North America. It seems more solid over here somehow and they use totally different apples. This weekend I came as close as I ever could to what he wants.....I used a combination of Gary Rhodes, Delia and me....and it turned out quite scrumptious if I don't say so myself. The other people at the table agreed it was the best apple pie they had ever eaten. I thought it was very good, if a bit tart...but then us North American's like our things alot sweeter than you do over here I have come to learn. I waited with trepidation to hear what my husband's take on it would be and yes! Result! He agreed that it was a very good apple pie....not quite as good as his mother's though....I have come to realize that perhaps I will never make an apple pie as good as his mother's. Her's has that elusive ingredient that I will never be able to add....memories. Mine will never taste the same, but that's ok...mine was "very good" and I'll settle for that!
