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Celtic Radio Community > Scottish Recipes > Sticky Toffee Pudding

Posted by: Catriona 13-Aug-2003, 07:02 AM

Although not strictly Scottish, this recipe is a wonderful pudding for autumnal days - and I have eaten this at his restaurant in London

Sticky Toffee Apple Pudding
Serves 6

"Toffee apples were always a Guy Fawkes Night treat when I was a
child. The crunchy boiled sugar surrounding the apple was wo moreish.
These days I'm not sure I could eat one of those, but the toffee
flavour does work well with apples, so here is a recipe giving you
exactly that.

"The toffee flavour can be as sticky as you want it to be. This is
created by dark soft brown sugar cooking and caramelizing around the
outside of the suet sponge, while the apples cook inside."

For the suet pastry
175 g (6 oz) self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
75 g (3 oz) beef or vegetable suet
150 ml (1/4 pint) water or milk
50 g (2 oz) unsalted butter
25+50 g (1-2 oz) dark soft brown sugar

For the filling
675 g (1-1/2 lb) Bramley apples, peeled and quartered
50 g (2 oz butter
75 g (3 oz) light soft brown sugar
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice

To make the pastry, sift together the flour and salt. Add the suet,
stirring in the water or milk. The dough can now be worked and mixed,
creating a smooth consistency. Wrap and rest for 20 minutes.
Spread the butter around a 900 ml (1-1/2 pint) pudding basin and
sprinkle with the dark brown sugar. The more sprinkled, the stronger
the toffee flavour will be. Roll out three-quarters of the pastry and
line the basin.

Halve the apple quarters once more into eight slices per apple. These
can now also be halved to shape into rough chunks.
Melt the butter. Once bubbling, add the apples and cook for 1-2
minutes. Add the sugar and lemon juice and remove from the stove.
Leave to cool. Once cooled, spoon the apples into the pudding basin.
Roll the remaining quarter of the pastry and place on top of the
pudding, sealing the edges well. This can now be covered with folded
greaseproof paper and foil and tied with string if necessary. Steam
over boiling water for 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 hours, topping up the hot water
as necessary.

Once cooked, remove from the steamer and rest for five minutes before
carefully turning out.
The sticky toffee apple pudding is now ready to serve and eats very
well with custard, thick cream or vanilla ice cream

Posted by: CatM 18-Aug-2003, 11:41 PM

Okay, I'm going to show my culinary ignorance - what's suet? Otherwise, sounds yummy!

Also, does anyone have a recipe for Steak & Kidney Pudding? I had an Aunt who used to make this.

Posted by: Catriona 19-Aug-2003, 02:02 AM

Suet is beef fat from around the kidneys. It is sold commercially as shredded or grated suet, dusted in flour. I don't think it is available commercially in America - but any good butcher will sell you some and will even put it through the grinder (mincer) for you..... or so an American friend who lives in WV tells me!

Strictly speaking, Steak and kidney pudding is an English dish, not a Scottish one, but here's a recipe....

Make a casserole of shin of beef or stewing steak with a couple of cleaned and prepared kidneys and some onions.... make the gravy quite thick.
Make up a batch of suet pastry as shown in the Sticky Toffee recipe BUT OMIT THE SUGAR!!!!

Just as in the pudding recipe, line a pudding bowl with suet pastry, fill with the steak and kidney mixture. Put a lid of suet pastry on the top of the pudding basin. Follow rest of the instructions as shown in the Toffee recipe. Steam for approximately same time as the toffee pudding....

Enjoy!

Personally, I don't like kidneys at all

Posted by: CatM 19-Aug-2003, 11:31 AM

Thanks for the recipe!

I'm not a big fan of kidneys either. But food is sometimes a great way to trigger fond memories, don't you think? She might have been English, but she was a kick!

Posted by: Catriona 19-Aug-2003, 04:19 PM

QUOTE (CatM @ Aug 19 2003, 06:31 PM)

But food is sometimes a great way to trigger fond memories, don't you think? She might have been English, but she was a kick!

Yes, I certainly do feel that food triggers fond memories....

Whenever I eat blackberry and apple pie - I think of wandering the hills behind my home (Pentland Hills, outside Edinburgh) and bringing the blackberries home to my Mum for her to bake a pie.... By the time we got home, we'd eaten POUNDS of the fruit - but the cooked pie was a symbol of my Mum's love of seasonal produce and so, even though we were full to bursting with the illicit fruit - we still ate the pie - with lashings of double cream!

BTW, unlike a lot of people who are of Scots ancestry but have no contact with the UK, I have NOTHING against the English.....

So there is absolutely no need to use that statement about your Aunt!!! Scotland and England have been joined since the Union of the Crowns in 1606 and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707.... Longer than the USA has been a country - so I really think it's time to bury the hatchet......

Posted by: CatM 19-Aug-2003, 05:47 PM

Sounds like a very happy family memory. Thank you for sharing it. As for the jib about the English, you're absolutely right. Mea culpa.

Posted by: Shadows 19-Aug-2003, 06:34 PM

QUOTE (CatM @ Aug 19 2003, 01:41 AM)

Okay, I'm going to show my culinary ignorance - what's suet? Otherwise, sounds yummy!

Also, does anyone have a recipe for Steak & Kidney Pudding? I had an Aunt who used to make this.

This is a Beef and Kidney pie, not pudding:

Recipe Name: ENGLISH BEEF AND KIDNEY PIE
Category: MEATS
Serves: 6

SOURCE Shadows

2 pounds chuck beef
1 pound beef kidney carefully trimmed
Beef suet (a piece the size of a large egg)
1 large onion coarsely chopped
1 cup rich beef stock
1 teaspo salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Cayenne pepper
1 1/2 teaspo Worcestershire sauce
Flour
Pastry for a single-crust pie

Cut the beef and kidney into one-and-one-half-inch cubes.

Try out the suet in a heavy kettle or Dutch oven, and remove the
suet cracklings. Add the onion and saute until transparent.

Add the beef and kidney and cook, stirring almost constantly, until
thoroughly browned.

Add the beef stock, salt, pepper and cayenne to taste and the
Worcestershire sauce. Stir well, cover and simmer until the meat
is tender, or about 1 hour and forty-five minutes.

If necessary, add enough water to almost cover the meat. Thicken
the broth with flour which has been blended with cold water, allowing
one and one-half teaspoons flour for each cup of broth. Transfer
the mixture to a casserole and cool until lukewarm.

Preheat oven to hot (450 degrees F.)

Roll the pastry to one-eighth-inch thickness and place over the
meat, sealing it to the sides of the casserole. Cut gashes for
the escape of steam. If desired, the pastry can be cut in strips
and arranged lattice-fashion over the meat.

Bake about ten minutes, lower heat to moderate (350 F.) and bake
until the crust is delicately browned, or about fifteen minutes
longer.

Posted by: CelticQueenCelticLord 10-Feb-2009, 11:06 AM

Thanks so much, that sounds like Grans. I really appreciate it

Posted by: Shadows 11-Feb-2009, 10:20 AM

You are welcome! Let us know how it turns out for you!

I know I liked it!

Posted by: stoirmeil 16-Feb-2009, 06:29 PM

QUOTE (Shadows @ 19-Aug-2003, 07:34 PM)

Try out the suet in a heavy kettle or Dutch oven, and remove the
suet cracklings.

Oh, I love this! "Try out the suet" -- just like trying out the whale blubber in Moby Dick.
Aaaarrrrggghhhh!! I love Moby Dick:

"It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try- works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.

"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit."