This is a dessert recipe crying out to be made mid-winter! It comes from Mick, who was my very first supervisor when I arrived in Melbourne, and of course it's part of the lab cookbook.
This self-saucing pudding uses a trick that I would've been very skeptical of if I hadn't seen it before: it has you placing a teeny portion of cake batter in a baking tray, and then pouring half a litre of boiling water over the top! Amazingly, it doesn't turn into a curdled mess of cake clumps floating in water; rather, the cake expands in the oven and the water settles underneath, picking up all the flavour it needs to form a thick sauce.
The other appealing features of this pudding are how diet-inclusive and pantry-friendly it is. I didn't need to shop for a single ingredient before I set to work. I will admit that I didn't have the highest of hopes for a vegan, gluten-free pudding based on rice flour, no-egg powder and only a small amount of cocoa. More fool me! The cake was plenty fluffy with a lovely crumb, and there was abundant dark, chocolatey sauce to go around.
We had a little leftover salted caramel coconut-based vegan icecream brought over by our friend Nat, and it was the perfect thing to scoop on top.
Vegan, gluten-free self-saucing chocolate pudding
(a recipe shared by Mick,
who credits it to taste.com.au)
pudding
60g Nuttelex
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 cup rice flour (Mick recommends Coles' organic)
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 generous teaspoons cocoa
1 teaspoon Orgran no-egg
1/2 cup soy milk
sauce
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 cups boiling water
Preheat an oven to 170°C. Lightly grease a high-walled baking dish.
In a large bowl, cream together the Nuttelex and caster sugar.
In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, cocoa and no-egg. In turns, gradually beat these dry ingredients and the soy milk into the butter mixture, to form a cake batter. Pour the batter into the baking dish.
Sprinkle the brown sugar and cocoa over the top of the pudding. Pour the boiling water over it all, and bake for 45 minutes.
Serve with a little vegan icecream.
We grew up with chocolate pudding and it was a favourite dessert - I am surprised too that rice flour works here - perhaps with all the liquid? But the family recipe I got was always vegan, though perhaps the egg replacer ingredients work with the rice flour. Looks delicious. It is definitely the weather for it (we had it last weekend because so cold and wet)
ReplyDeleteInteresting that your family recipe was vegan, Johanna! You might be right that the egg replacer works well with the rice flour here.
DeleteI love self saucing puddings! I too would have been sceptical about one based on rice flour, but sounds like it worked perfectly!
ReplyDeleteI don't make them often, but self-saucing pudding are SO GOOD this time of year! I should be doing this every weekend. :D
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