Banana and butterscotch pudding

As winter closes in on us and evenings grow darker and colder, it's time to bring out that most comforting of all comfort food: the pudding. This unstuffupable self-saucing pudding was published in The Herald Sun nearly ten years ago, and I've kept the clipping in one of my books of miscellaneous recipes. I've made some small changes to quantities and added some cinnamon. The flavour is more like golden syrup dumpling than a true butterscotch taste, so if you don't like the sound of that, you'll need to add more brown sugar into the sauce.
This pudding is best served fresh from the oven, so when I need to make it ahead of time, I assemble the entire pudding (leaving it uncooked), cover with cling wrap and refrigerate. When I'm ready to cook it, I simply peel off the cling wrap and whack the pudding in the oven.

Ingredients 

125 g plain flour

Pinch of salt

120 g caster sugar

3 tsp baking powder

⅓ tsp ground cinnamon

1 banana, mashed

250 ml milk

80 g unsalted butter

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract 

Sauce 

140 g brown sugar

3 Tbs golden syrup

250 ml boiling water

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C and grease a 2.5 litre baking or casserole dish.
2. Sift flour, salt, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon together into a mixing bowl.
3. By hand, or using a mixer with a whisk attachment, whisk in the banana, milk, butter, egg and vanilla until combined. Don't overmix.
4. Pour mixture into prepared dish.
5. Heat sauce ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally until boiling. Remove from heat and slowly drizzle the sauce over the pudding mixture.
6. Bake pudding uncovered 40–45 minutes.
7. Serve with ice cream.

Serves 4–6

Tips

• The simplest way to mash bananas is with the back of a fork.
• Don't skimp on the ice cream, because it's necessary to offset the very sweet golden syrup flavour of the pudding.
• The sauce is quite gluggy and doesn't reheat back to its former glory – so it really is best fresh from the oven.