Caramel Ginger Pudding - An Heirloom Recipe Series

A Pudding & Some Unanswered Questions - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another Heirloom Recipe on Extra Food Chat with Kath!

The recipe I am sharing today was a bit of a mystery when I began testing it.

The original recipe is titled ‘Caramel Ginger Bread’, which had me thinking it was similar to a gingerbread cake. When I began baking however, I realised there were no eggs in the recipe, which seemed odd if it were a cake.

Then recipe stipulating to bake the ‘cake’ in a greased dish also had me thinking I wasn’t actually making a cake.

As you can see in the images of the original recipe, the caramel sauce was called ‘Caramel Icing’, which again has me thinking this recipe must be a cake. However when I made the caramel icing, it was definitely more a caramel sauce, and put together with the ‘not quite a cake baked in a dish’, it struck me I’d just made a pudding with caramel sauce!

So after all that, this recipe is a dessert that would be a lovely end to a nice dinner or lunch. It is quite a frugal recipe, not a lot of butter is used even in the caramel, and in the pudding the original recipe says to use ‘1 cup sour milk’ which makes me think it was a way of using up milk that had soured. I used buttermilk, however regular milk works well too.

The caramel recipe also felt like a frugal way to make caramel, as milk was offered as an option rather than cream. I’ve never seen a recipe asking for milk in a caramel, and it was interesting to see that it worked, even when the only milk we had was skim milk! If you wanted to make a mildly more decadent pudding, you could use thin/pouring cream instead.

For the ginger element, the recipe asked for ‘pres ginger’. At first I had no idea what that was, until finally I assumed ‘pres’ must be short for preserved? First I used glacé ginger which was great, and the next time I made it I used crystallised ginger. You can use whatever you have or like the best, and we’ll just stick with the assumption that that is was ‘pres’ means!

Sometimes its a little frustrating that I can’t just ask my Grandma these kinds of questions about her recipes. Its a shame I didn’t know they existed until after she died. It’s not the first time I’ve felt some level of regret or disappointment in terms of questions I never got to ask.

When my Grandparent’s house was being cleared out I found a duffle bag full of photos. Many were from my Grandparents early years of marriage, though there were some of Grandma and her sister as children, and a couple of my Grandpa growing up too. I’d never seen any of these photos before, and it was frustrating that no one bothered to share them with us. I carefully organised the photos into some kind of chronological order to the best of my ability, and put them all in albums so they’d be preserved. But there are many photos with stories we’ll never hear.

A couple of years or so after my Grandma died, I had a dream that we were in her kitchen and she was making a meal for us. She was happier than I’d known her in life, and I had the intense feeling that I had a very short time to ask her everything I’d never known I needed or wanted to know when she was alive. It was like she was back just for a moment, but I knew she’d be gone again soon. It was a bit of a stressful dream as I knew there would not be time to ask everything and I couldn’t think of what to ask first. I think I woke up before I’d had a chance to ask anything of my Grandma, so everything remained a mystery. So I guess I’ll just have to keep making it up as I go along and hope I am somewhat near the truth!

Caramel Ginger Pudding

Ingredients:

60g unsalted butter + extra for greasing, at room temp

60g brown or dark brown sugar (caster sugar works well too)

2 tbsp treacle

250ml buttermilk

2 tsp ginger

1 tsp bicarb soda

1 tsp mixed spice (or similar)

230g plain flour

60g glacé, crystallised or stem ginger, finely chopped

Ingredients for the Caramel:

200g brown or dark brown sugar

20g unsalted butter

105ml milk or pouring cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius and lightly grease a baking dish with approx. 1.25L/5 cup capacity. 

2. In a medium bowl mix the butter, sugar and treacle until well combined - I used an electric handheld mixer, but you could use a stand mixer.

3. Add the milk gradually, and gently mix on low speed as you are pouring it in. It will look like too much milk and won’t incorporate well into the butter at this stage, but it will be ok.

4. In a smaller bowl, add the flour, spices and sift in the bicarb soda. Add this to the milk and butter mixture and gently mix until everything comes together and there are no lumps.

5. Stir in the ginger, then pour into your prepared baking dish. 

6. Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the top is springy and a skewer comes out clean (if you like a wetter textured pudding cook for 5-10 mins less, I can’t stand this texture and prefer a more cake  like pudding, plus the caramel added later adds enough ‘stoge’ factor for me!). 

7. When the pudding is close to coming out of the oven, start the caramel by adding all the ingredients to a small/medium saucepan. Place over medium/high heat and stir until the butter and sugar have melted. Then allow the caramel to come to the boil, and allow to boil for 4.5 minutes. Keep an eye on it as the caramel may boil over if left alone. Swirl the pan to promote even cooking if necessary and reduce the heat a little if needed.

8. Once the pudding is out of the oven, pour half the caramel over the pudding. Pour over a bit more caramel over each individual serve of pudding. Serve with cream or ice cream (as you can see in the photos I didn’t have any ice cream, but I highly recommend you serve it with some!).

Serves about 6. Pudding and caramel will keep in the fridge for a few days - if you have leftovers, pour any remaining caramel over the pudding so it doesn’t dry out in the fridge. 

*If you wish to make this in advance, make the pudding a day before or earlier in the day you wish to serve it, then reheat when needed and make the caramel just before serving. 

Did you have a chance to talk to your relatives about their lives? Were they forthcoming about talking about it? Or do you still have questions like me you’ll never get the answers to?

I have tried with other relatives since my Grandma died to ask more questions and find out more about their lives pre when I have known them. I haven’t found it very successful! Most of my relatives haven’t been interested in talking about the past, or possibly felt the questions were invasive or too personal in nature (not that they really were! I asked an older relative recently what her maiden name was as I realised I’d never known, and was given the impression I’d asked too much!).

Thanks again for your support, if you have any questions, comments or just want to say hi you can find me via return email or in the comments of this post.

I’ll see you again on Friday for more food chat!