Hot Malt Sponge with Caramel Custard and Milk Chocoalte

The perfect pudding for this bitterly cold weather

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Hello, happy Friday. Happy New Year!

I don’t know about any of you, but getting going again this year has felt tough. After an unscheduled break over the Christmas period, after I was knocked sideways by a rather nasty bout of flu, I have felt exhausted. The weather in London is also bitterly cold, so I’ve just wanted to curl up under a blanket and ignore the world. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been possible. Our builders are turning up first thing on Monday to start on our long-awaited renovation, and that has meant I have had a lot going on. Everything has been packed up, almost like we were moving house again. I have travelled to and from our storage unit multiple times a day; I’m completely over the constant lifting of boxes. What I am trying to say is that I was in severe need of some comfort food.

At this time of year, I think baking recipes can go one of two ways. Either they’re easy and comforting, or they’re a project bake that involves multiple elements and a bigger time commitment, perfect for when it’s too cold to venture outside and you want something to keep busy. Today's recipe is the former, a super easy and ridiculously comforting dessert. Perfect for those moments when a movie marathon, a blanket, and cuddles with the dog seem like the perfect day.

When I think of comfort desserts, my mind almost always goes to dishes that involve custard. It instantly takes me back to childhood. From school cafeteria puddings like chocolate sponge with chocolate custard or jam sponge with vanilla custard to the dessert of my childhood, the classic apple crumble, us Brits know the value of a big bowl of custard. It's a salve, something that should be prescribed when cosiness is needed, when you need a big hug. Custard is the answer. For this particular custard vehicle, I wanted something really easy to make but which gave you all of the old-school vibes, something you might find on a dessert menu at the pub, something you’d enjoy after a Sunday roast. I settled on a warm malt sponge served with a caramel custard and a milk chocolate sauce. As we sat down to eat this, it really felt like I was ticking off everything I want in a cosy, comforting dish. It was perfection.

The custard is a modification of a classic crème anglaise but made to have all the flavour you love from a salted caramel sauce. You might notice the sugar level seems higher than a traditional crème anglaise, and you’d be right. The recipe takes advantage of the fact that caramelised sugar tastes less sweet than plain sugar, so it means we can use a little more to ensure the custard has a strong caramel flavour without making the whole thing taste too sweet. The milk chocolate sauce feels like the glue that brings both of the other elements together. For the cake I decided to make a brown butter malt-infused number. Because it is made with brown butter, it can be made with very little effort, a win for an easy weekend dessert if you ask me. The cake uses the muffin method, simply combining the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and stirring everything together to very quickly make a cake batter.

A Pudding Aside

Before we get to the recipe, I thought it might be worth clearing up a little bit of linguistic confusion. To my friends in the US, pudding is a specific dish, a type of custard that is often set with cornflour (cornstarch). In the UK the ‘pudding’ is a lot more complicated and the source of much confusion to those visiting our shores. In its most common usage, pudding simply refers to dessert, i.e. "What are we having for pudding?’ but that is just one usage of the word. Where the confusion seems to enter is the traditional origin of the word. Pudding classically refers to a category of sweet and savoury dishes that are boiled or steamed in either a pudding basin (sticky toffee pudding, suet puddings) or something like a cloth or an animal casing (black pudding, haggis etc). When it comes to desserts, ‘puddings’ in the strict sense of the word would only refer to steamed or boiled dishes, but it has become a catch-all term for anything served as part of the dessert course. Where it gets truly confusing is when you realise that there are dishes that don’t fit into either of these definitions. Maybe a discussion for another time, but Yorkshire Puddings? The accompaniment of any good Sunday roast? They’re neither from Yorkshire nor a pudding. If you’re confused, you're not alone! Just know that if someone asks you what you’d like for pudding, 99% of the time they’re talking about dessert.