When you have accidentally bought too many packs of medjool dates which need to be eaten before you go away on holiday, what do you do? Do you ration them out as healthy snacks, or do you mix them with butter, flour and sugar and make a sticky toffee pudding? I’ll let you guess which fork in the road I took – there wasn’t much of a decision making process to be honest once I had seen Nigella’s easy sticky toffee pudding recipe.
And that, my friends, is why I will never be skinny. Someone reminded me recently of the Kate Moss quote “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. No Kate, you just aren’t eating the right food. Sometimes it really is worth those extra couple of pounds, and this recipe is one of them.
The recipe is incredibly easy. It is scarily easy. And it tastes unbelievably good. Apart from the dates it can be made with things which are most likely to be in your store cupboard, and from cupboard to mouth takes less than one hour – 5 minutes of that one hour is effort.
Firstly you make the cake mix, which can be done with a wooden spoon as there is no need to cream butter and sugar etc. Then you stir in the chopped dates – the most complicated part of this is getting the sticky dates off of your fingers / the chopping board / the knife and into the cake mixture without eating them first.
Then, then the incredibleness (is that a word? it should be) of the pudding: you sprinkle (or should that be drench) the top of the cake mix with brown sugar, dot it with butter, and pour boiling water over the top of the mixture (yes, really). It looks like a mess in a bowl, but you have to put your faith in lovely Nigella. It works. Ignore the mess, put it in the oven (put a baking tray underneath to catch any dribbles, because scraping that mess off the oven base is not something you want to do, take it from me), and set the timer for 45 minutes.
What happens in that 45 minutes is that the sponge rises to the top of the dish and the sugar, butter and water sinks to the bottom but self mixes into a thick and fudgy toffee sauce. It is incredible. Yes, it is very sweet, but a dollop of extra thick cream dampens the sweetness, and that certainly doesn’t stop you eating it! It is also nice cold the next day (and the next day – it does make six very generous portions).
Nigella’s easy sticky toffee pudding – original recipe here
- Cake – 100g muscavado sugar, 175g self raising flour, 125ml full fat milk, 1 egg, 1tsp vanilla extract, 50g melted butter, 200g chopped dates
- Sauce – 200g muscavado sugar, 25g butter, 500ml boiling water
Mix the milk, egg, vanilla extract and butter together and stir in the sugar and flour. Fold in the chopped dates and pour into a buttered dish. Evenly layer the sugar on top and dot with the butter. Pour over the water and bake for 45 minutes in a pre-heated 180 degree oven.
If Kate tried it, she’d definitely have a bit more meat on her bones.
Now this, I would call pure YUM. I love dates. As a matter of fact, I have a couple of packages in the kitchen right now, leftover from Christmas. I’ve been sitting here thinking about something sweet, and this looks like the winning ticket! 🙂 Just lovely.
Let me know how you get on!
Delicious!
Oh, I bet that was good!