How to bake the perfect puddings

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Introduction

Dinnertime comes around and effort has gone into making a healthy meal with lots of vegetables and fresh food. Eating well for dinner, though, doesn't just mean that you've gotten some of your five a day, it also means that there is room left for pudding! As a treat with a cup of tea or coffee after a nice meal, pudding may as well be as tasty as you can make it, because that's the point of gooey delicious pudding, after all.

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Prepping the ingredients

Many puddings, such as spotted dick, plum puddings or sticky toffee puddings, include dried fruit as an essential ingredient. Often these dried fruits need to be rehydrated in some way to ensure that the pudding is moist and the fruit juicy after cooking. Overnight soaking in alcohol such as brandy can make all the difference to a pudding's consistency.

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Preparing the tin

Those puddings that require a tin or basin to create the shape of the pudding while cooking require careful preparation. Fold a pleat in the centre of a sheet of buttered baking paper and a sheet of tinfoil. Use these to line the basin or tin and tie string around the edge of the basin to hold them in place, before folding over the foil to cover the top of the pudding. Some puddings only require the inside of a ramekin to be buttered, and if necessary to the recipe, floured or dusted with cocoa.

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Adding topping

Topping is the cherry on top of a pudding, whether it is a crumble top or a syrupy covering. Instead of adding sauce to a cooked sticky toffee pudding, to keep the sponge moist, one option is to freeze half the sauce and place it in the bottom of the tin before adding batter and cooking. Tweaks to crumble toppings can also elevate a simple apple crumble by adding the flavours of crumbled marzipan, chopped nuts and the zest of a lemon.

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Getting the right consistency

Following the recipe instructions exactly are essential for puddings, as if the mixture is too dry or too thin then it won't cook as planned and might be cracked or otherwise not hold its shape. In addition, after a pudding has finished cooking, let it stand out on a rack for about five minutes before turning it out, as otherwise it might break apart.

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Oven tips

If you have a fan oven and a recipe for a non-fan oven, turning the heat down by ten degrees or so can prevent burning. The middle shelf is also the most heat stable, and keeping the oven door closed prevents the pudding from collapsing. A covering of tinfoil when the pudding looks brown also prevents further colour developing while letting the pudding cook properly.

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Bread and butter pudding

Soaking raisins and sultanas in brandy gives a luxuriously juicy bread and butter pudding. Any white bread or fruit bread can be used for this pudding, but the ripped up slices should be buttered and overlapped for the ideal texture. The only real cooking involved is the custard, which is made by bringing full-fat milk to the boil with a vanilla pod, and whisking it and cream together slowly with a beaten egg and sugar mixture. Sprinkles of brown sugar and grated nutmeg top off the dessert, which has to be baked in a 180 degree oven until brown.

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Spotted dick

An exotic mix of dried fruits such as cranberries and cherries along with raisins goes into making spotted dick pudding. The basic dough is a mixture of suet, flour, caster sugar, baking powder and cinnamon, made pliable with milk and the juice and zest of an orange. Once rolled out, this dough should be sprinkled with fruit and rolled up tightly, before steaming for 75 minutes. The piece de resistance of this pudding is the butter, brown sugar and orange juice simmered sauce with cinnamon and vanilla flavourings.

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Crumbles

Mixing and matching berries and larger fruits, or simply choosing your favourite fruit is key to a good crumble. Another knack to a perfect crumble is getting the contrasting textures of the cooked fruit bottom layer and topping right. Cutting fruit into similar size pieces helps, and to tweak the dish's tartness, squeeze in lemon juice, mix in sugar, or swap some cooking apples for eaters. Butter, flour and sugar, roughly crumbled makes the topping, along with nuts or cinnamon to taste. A 200 degree oven bakes the layered crumble in 45 minutes.