Lili Marlene’s Easy Chocolate Steamed Pudding

What really matters about family cooking isn’t complicated recipes with dozens of obscure and expensive ingredients. What really matters is how often you actually make nice things for the family, things that they want to eat, putting the hot goodies onto the table for everyone to enjoy. If you have kids, today’s meals are the stuff of childhood memories that will last a lifetime. I think it is preferable that those memories do not consist primarily of foods with names that start with “Mc” or "Nanna's".


Lili Marlene’s Easy Chocolate Steamed Pudding

Ingredients
60g butter
½ cup brown sugar
60-70g quality dark chocolate, broken up into pieces
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 cup boiling water
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup self-raising flour
½ cup ground almonds (omit if you want a moister, more spongy texture)

Special Equipment
A pudding steamer tin with a lid.
A large saucepan with a lid, large enough for the steamer to bob about inside it.

Method
Place the butter, brown sugar, chocolate pieces, vanilla and bicarb into a large heat-resistant mixing bowl.
Pour over the boiling water and stir to mix. Leave it to cool down.
Mix in the beaten eggs, then mix in the flour and the ground almonds.
Grease the steamer tin. Pour the mixture into it and secure the lid. Place the tin into the saucepan with enough boiling water in it to float the tin in it.
Steam pudding for 1 ¾ hours, checking every ½ hour or so to make sure that it is not boiling dry.
Carefully turn the hot pudding out, upside-down onto a plate.
Serve hot with pouring custard.

Copyright Lili Marlene 2010.