Top positive review
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5.0 out of 5 starsGorgeous, Gorgeous Puddings!!!!
ByArachne202on 25 August 2015
So far, I have cooked and eaten 11 of the 150 recipes in this book.
Around half the recipes in the book are for steamed puddings, but I bought a 2-pint metal steamer off the internet, and have found steaming to be very straightforward. The rest are an eclectic mix of baked puddings, chilled desserts, things to do with fruit, and the like. The authors are very pro-fruit, particularly locally-sourced fruit such as apples, pears, damsons, gooseberries etc. and incorporate fruit into a good many recipes. Quite a few also involve wine, liqueurs and alcohol (...yummm...) either in the cooking or the serving suggestions, but that can be left out for children and teetotallers.
I have made: Sticky Toffee Pudding, Syrup Sponge, Rice Pudding, Baked Custard, Orange Upside-Down Pudding, Duchess's Pudding (this is really nice!), Bakewell Pudding, Prune and Muscat Pudding (well, I had prunes and port leftover from Christmas....), Butterscotch Tart, Chocolate Mousse, and Christmas Pudding (first time I've made a Christmas pudding from scratch!).
There are some proofreading errors and vague instructions. It doesn't actually mention to put the mousse in the fridge, or how long it takes to set. It doesn't say how long a Christmas pudding takes to mature - I made it on Christmas Eve, and it was nice the next day, but as it took us a week to eat it I could tell it was getting nicer over time. I have doubled the quantities of the rice in the rice pudding because it looked wrong (and that works well!), I am going to lessen the water and double the dates when I redo the sticky toffee pudding, and I have to figure out how to make the orange upside-down pudding taste more of oranges (at Mr Arachne202's request.)
But this is still a very enjoyable book. I am particularly fascinated with the section on "Forgotten Puddings", and will enjoy recreating what would have been served at Downton Abbey. Some of the ingredients are a little obscure - where does a normal person get elderflower from? Or blackberry liqueur? Mostly, however, ingredients have been straightforward enough to find.
So I'm now on a pudding quest to make and eat every recipe in the book. That should only take a few years.....