Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding

Catching up... catching up...

One night... hubby came home and told me a news.... ummm... some good news obviously... but... it was too long ago, that I can't really remember now!!! Oppsss.. that's the problem with me not catching up with my posts, and I tend to be very forgetful! >.<

But whatever the good news was, he deserved a yummy dessert! A chocolate self saucing pudding!!!

I first tasted this recipe was at a friend's place and we all had to bring in a dish! Kitty - our high school masterchef who used to bring in all sorts of food for us - the famous rice pudding was my favourite, this time she brought in some chocolate pudding with cream fraiche! yummmmmm....

Serves 4

Ingredients:

125g plain flour

a pinch of salt

120g caster sugar

3 tsp baking powder

4 tbsp cocoa powder

250ml milk

85g unsalted butter, melted

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract

topping:

185g soft brown sugar

2 tbsp cocoas

250ml boiling water

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Sift the flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, and cocoa powder into a bowl. Add the milk, butter, egg and vanilla extract and mix with beaters until combined. Pour into 4 250ml greased pudding moulds.

2. To make the topping, stir the brown sugar with cocoa powder in a bowl to combine. Then sprinkle it over the pudding batter.

3. Sit the pudding moulds in a baking tray filled with boiling water up to half way of the moulds. Bake for 20-25min. Serve with cream fraiche or ice-cream.

A very easy but awesome recipe. Better still, you can pre-make the batter beforehand, and refrigerate it until you need it. Then you just pour it into the moulds, sprinkle with topping and into the oven! Great for dinner parties!!!

Also, looking at the ingredients, it actually not that bad for you!!! hahaha... yeah... we need to comfort ourselves every now and then! There's no actual chocolate pieces in there, only cocoa powder, and there's only 85g of butter to share between 4! Not that bad!!!! And as for the topping - I didn't really follow the 185g soft brown sugar, I probably only used 3-4tbsp. But that's up to you, whether you want it real sweet or not!

Cream fraiche or ice-cream to serve is ESSENTIAL!!!! It helps to lighten the the texture, makes it not as heavy! Although this will put a few more calories on the radar, but it's absolute crucial!!!! Makes it taste better too, and the magical feeling of having spoonful of hot and cold dessert together in the mouth... AMAZING! =)

Be mindful that you don't over-cook the pudding as well, otherwise it won't have the self-saucing effect, which happened to me a couple of times. I guess it depends on the strength of your oven too! So it's more like a trial and error process.

Enjoy!!!