Lemon delicious

To continue the theme of my last post, I’ve found another pudding that’s not common, but is definitely a crowd-pleaser. While it belongs to an earlier generation than mine, I’ve noticed lemon delicious is making its way back into the cookbooks recently. It’s one of those Australian recipes handed down through families over the years, so I’d say there’s quite a few version of it out there. A few weeks ago, I sat through an in-depth discussion between my grandma-in-law and an aunt-in-law as they debated whether or not you should strain the pulp from the lemon juice (I’d love to give you a run-down of both sides of that argument, but I was too busy stuffing my face to pay close attention).

If you have no idea what lemon delicious is, imagine a light lemon sponge floating over a creamy lemon sauce, and pure heaven where the two meet.

Now, the word on the street (okay, in the recipe books) is that it’s necessary to bake lemon delicious in a water bath. “What’s that?” you wonder. A water bath is a basin (usually a large, deep roasting pan), filled with water, into which you place the pudding dish. The purpose is to prevent the mixture curdling during cooking.

Due to the fact that every single lemon delicious recipe I’ve seen requires this water bath, I have included the step in my recipe here; however, I have made lemon delicious sans water bath before, and there were no dire side effects. Perhaps I was just lucky.

Place the dish in a water bath

Lemon delicious can be served warm or cold. I don't like to hoe into lemon delicious fresh from the oven, because the sauce is still thin, runny and too hot for my greedy little mouth. I prefer to leave the pudding on the bench for an hour or so and serve lukewarm, or pop it into the fridge and serve cold later on. The sauce will thicken up nicely as the pudding cools. This makes lemon delicous a fantastic dessert to prepare the day before you need it, and keep in the fridge overnight.

Fresh from the oven, the sauce is quite thin

The sauce will thicken as the pudding cools

Ingredients

70 g unsalted butter, softened

200 g caster sugar

Zest of 1 lemon

3 eggs, separated

90 g self-raising flour

400 ml milk

80 ml lemon juice

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C and grease a 2.5 litre baking or casserole dish.
2. Beat butter, sugar and lemon rind with an electric mixer until very well combined.
3. Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each.
4. Add flour, lemon juice a milk, and beat on low speed until combined.
5. In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until the form soft peaks. Fold the egg whites into the mixture.
6. Pour mixture into prepared dish, place in water bath and bake uncovered 50 minutes.
7. Leave to cool or refrigerate before serving. Dust with icing sugar and serve with cream.

Serves 6.

Beat egg whites to soft peaks

Tips

• If you’d like to use fresh lemon juice, I suggest you use more than 80 ml. I find that bottled lemon juice has a more concentrated flavour than lemons I squeeze myself (perhaps I should try straining).
• Put a twist on this dish by using lime instead of lemon. Remember that lime has a stronger, sharper flavour than lemon, so you won’t need to use as much zest and juice.

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.