Relaxed Parents

I made sure that every dish in the house was washed. That was just as well, because we used all of them. All of them! No-one got any pudding (desert to southrons) until after 10pm but at least that gave them a chance to find space for it.

The pudding in question (as mentioned yesterday) is supermum’s favourite of all time. Generally, i’ts what we’d regard as a bit of a restaurant dish and she’d offered to cook it herself, especially since I planned to provide it “just in time”, straight out of the oven and she has this image of me as someone who gets stressed in the kitchen (I don’t – it just seems to provide an arena for my latent perfectionism to seriously kick off in. I think that’s a contributing area, aside from sexism, as to why so many more men seem to be professional chefs. It provides an arena to be a domineering, anal control freak like no other outside of an army on a battlefield which I’ve heard is also popular with a certain type of male).

I kept it (reasonably) under control and thankfully, she and our small number of guests chose to regard it as a floorshow rather than a meltdown. The meltdown was reserved for the chocolate, anyway.

So just what was it that I was devoting all this fuss to?

Chocolate fondant puddings. I should have taken pictures – it’s highly unlikely I’ll manage this trick twice. The recipe was in a free Waitrose magazine supermum left cunningly lying around the kitchen opened to the relevant page. I didn’t actually notice (supermum forgot that the kitchen table is covered with magazines opened to various pages, not infrequently recipes) so she patiently spelled it out to me and presented me with two bars of 70% cocoa chocolate as a further hint.

Asides from 200g of chocolate, you need four eggs, plain flour, butter and 100g of icing sugar. Note – DO NOT ADJUST THE QUANTITIES.

1. Find four metal pudding moulds. I couldn’t so I used five ceramic ramekins. Grease the inside of each one with butter then evenly coat with flour – tap out the remainder and put them to one side.
2. Turn the oven on – 180 degrees Celsius.
3. You’ll need to melt the chocolate with 125g of butter. There’s a special thingamajig for this called a bain-marie pan but I used a heatproof glass bowl in a sieve balanced above a pan with simmering water. It’s important that the chocolate melts, not cooks.
4. Meanwhile, whisk two eggs, two egg yolks and the caster sugar on high until thick enough to take some effort stirring.
5. Fold in the chocolate and butter mixture (which you should have removed from the heat as soon as it’s all melted).  Add 25g of plain flour, sifted, carry on stirring…
6. At this point, you should have a smooth, glutinous mixture.  Divide it between the ramekins and put in the oven for 15 minutes and no longer.  Honestly, that’s enough.
7. Remove them from the oven and let them stand for a minute or so.  Tip out onto plates.

You can serve with cream but really, they don’t need much of anything else if the chocolate is good enough.