Have you been watching the Great British Baking Show on PBS?  The Englishman and I are pretty obsessed and look forward to it every week.  Watching the show has made me inspired to bake more British desserts, and what better way to start than with a steamed chocolate pudding?

When you normally hear the word pudding in the US, you immediately think of the classic custard dessert or the jello variety.  But in the UK, pudding is actually more along the lines of a sponge cake covered in some sort of sauce (a fact I did not learn until I met my husband).  And steamed pudding is a sponge cake that is well, steamed.

To prepare myself to create a steamed chocolate pudding, I watched Paul Hollywood’s Pies and Puds series on you tube to figure out the best way to create a proper pud.  Oh, and I should mention that steamed pudding is one of the Englishman’s favorite desserts, so no pressure right?  Right.

I found a useful collection of recipes online and then adapted one of them based on the tools that I had.   You see, normally steamed pudding is made in a pudding mold, but since I did not have one of those, I used a glass pyrex dish instead and it worked out beautifully.

The art of making a steamed pudding is to make sure the cake is still light and spongy, but gets cooked all the way through.  For my pud, I used a 4 cup pyrex bowl and steamed it for about an hour.  I think next time I’ll steam it for about 55 minutes since the cake was not quite the light spongy texture I was aiming for.

Overall, the steamed chocolate pudding was relatively easy to make and the Englishman loved it, so I consider it a win in my book.

Steamed Chocolate Pudding (adapted from this recipe)

Ingredients:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

1 tbsp butter, softened

1/4 tsp cream of tartar

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 egg

1 oz semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled

1/2 cup almond milk

Pinch of salt

Directions:

Cream your butter and sugar.  Fold in your flour, salt, cream of tartar, and baking soda and continue to mix until well blended.

Gently fold in your chocolate and almond milk and continue to mix.  Pour batter into a greased pudding mold or pyrex dish.  If you don’t have a pudding mold cover your dish with foil and tie a string around it so it’s easy to remove (thanks for the tip Paul Hollywood).

Fill a deep pot with about 1 inch of water and bring to a boil.  Place your steamer or a rack on top of the pot and then gently place your pudding in the steamer.   I highly recommend using a steamer for this step.

Cover the pot with a lid and bring the water down to a simmer.  Let your pudding cook for 50-55 minutes, and additional water to the steamer if needed.

Once your pudding is done steaming, remove from the steamer and let it cool.  Normally the pudding is covered in a sauce, but I decided to give it a Valentine’s Day flair and added pink and red sprinkles and powdered sugar.

Overall I was really impressed how the steamed chocolate pudding turned out!  The flavor was spot on and it was a delightful cake that we had with breakfast and tea the next day.  I will admit the overall process is quite time intensive, but I’ll definitely try my hand at steamed pudding again.