Sticky Date Pudding with Butterscotch Sauce

Sticky Date Pudding with a not so good but acceptable Butterscotch Sauce (almost going to split if pushed), with a ring of contrasting Brown Sugar Sauce Ingredients: Sticky Date Pudding (Yield 6x Dariole moulds)

• 75g Dates, coarsely chopped
• 75ml Water
• 3g Bi Carbonate Soda (Proper accurate weighing scale needed)

• 1x Egg (55g standard)
• 100g Sugar, Caster

• 115g Flour, Cake and sifted
• 8g Baking Powder
• Sensible pinch of Salt

• 30g Walnuts, coarsely chopped
• 75ml Milk, proper full-cream please
• 30g Butter, Unsalted and melted
• 3ml Vanilla Essence

• Oil Spray

Butterscotch Sauce (3 ingredients- Fat, Sugar and more Fat... Yum. Yield 300ml, plenty)

• 60g Butter, Unsalted
• 120g Sugar, Soft Brown
• 225ml Cream, Whipping (35-40% fat content)

Optional Brown Sugar garnishing sauce

• 1 part Butter, Unsalted
• 3 parts Sugar, Soft Brown
• Water (I used Cream but I think water will work better to emulsify the sugar with the butter)

Equipment:

• Stove
• Saucepan depending on yield
• Cooking spoon
• Steamer oven (Or a stove top steamer)
• Roasting/baking tray (Can be substituted with a flat plate)
• 7x Dariole moulds
• Cling Wrap
• Sieve
• Mixing Bowls
• Knife (At least a paring, plus a proper chefs knife if the nuts and date aren't already chopped up)
• Cutting board

Optional equipment:

• Large piping bag (At least 340mm long)
• Plain piping nozzle (wide enough to allow the chopped nuts and dates to pass easily, but can still be covered with your thumb/finger. I use a No.11 but still depends on how coarse you process you nuts and dates. You too small a nozzle without and quick interchange unit and the mixture jams in the nozzle, you lose yield cleaning out the bag)

Cooking: Sticky Date Pudding 1. Preheat your steamer. 2. Heat the 75g chopped Dates with the 75ml Water in a saucepan to soften and until almost all the sitting water is gone. 3. While the dates are heating up, Cream together the the Egg and the 100g Caster Sugar until smooth and light... creaming until white is optional. 4. Sift together the 115g Cake Flour with 8g Baking Powder and add the sensible pinch of salt. 5. When the Dates are dry enough, take the pan off the heat and add in the 3g BiCarb Soda and mix together. 6. Mix the Egg-Sugar mix into the Cake Flour Mix, add in the Milk and Melted Butter into help thin the mixture as you combine everything together including the Dates and Walnuts. (You don't have to be gentle with folding the mix together, the bicarb and baking powder are your rising agents) 7. Spray generously with Oil into your Dariole moulds. (Generously, not deep-frying) 8. You can spoon or pipe into the mould 1/2 way up. HALF WAY UP! Too much and you get a muffin base when you invert it for serving. 9. Place the mould onto a roasting dish/tray or a plate, and cling wrap the whole assembly with slack tension but fully covering the mould tops. 10. Make sure the mould tops are sealed and you can pierce holes in the cling wrap surrounding the moulds to give the cling wrap more chance to relief tension as it shrinks in the heat and not vacuum down onto the moulds. 11. Steam for 30 minutes or until it probe tested clean. Butterscotch Sauce 1. Place all sauce ingredients in a saucepan, heat up then simmer for 2-3 minutes. The more you cook it the richer it gets, then splits if pushed too far. Optional Brown Sugar garnishing sauce 1. Melt the Unsalted Butter in a saucepan. 2. Add the Brown Sugar. 3. Reconstitute the Sugar and Butter together with Water or Cream, and simmer together to melt the sugar completely(as the sugar will not melt naturally into the butter without burning.) 4. Use immediately as it's more or less just brown sugar liquid paste and will set if left to cool. Soft steamed pudding, chew of the dates, bite of the nuts, moist warm sauce. Add in praline snaps for added crunch. Plating: 1. Butterscotch Sauce base on a Warm Plate. 2. Optional Brown Sugar ring drizzled on. 3. Pop on the Pudding by inverting it from the mould, then placing it on the place. Another nice garnish is a nutty praline snaps or nut brittle, both sugar and nut snaps. Since it's a warm dessert, garnishes like chocolate motifs will not work since they will melt on the pudding. Over vibrant Technicolor jpeg picture.