Syrup Sponge Puddings

As it's gone cold again recently I decided that I wanted to make a traditional, warming, comforting pudding as a change from cake. The simple, traditional puddings such as my apple crumble are often the best. They don't take too much effort to prepare, the time is usually spent in the cooking and at the end you get something delicious that goes well with a generous helping of custard. I hadn't actually made syrup sponge puddings before when I got the idea for making them last week but I knew that I was bound to find a good recipe in one of my books.

I don't own a pudding basin so I made 6 individual sized puddings in silicone pudding moulds. I baked the puddings in a bain marie in the oven as I remembered seeing this method on an episode of the Great British Bake Off. Although I probably could have fitted all of the puddings in my steamer, it seemed to make more sense at the time to do them in the oven. The steamer was handy for reheating the puddings though as we don't have a microwave. As I made 6 puddings this kept us happy for 3 days. I served up 2 at a time and left the other puddings in their moulds until cold and then covered with cling film and put them in the fridge. They took about 10 minutes to reheat in the steamer.

The recipe I used was from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess book, even after all the baking books I've bought in the past few years, this is still the book that I tend to refer back to the most. Everything I've made from it has always turned out really well. I used Nigella's recipe for syrup sponge pudding which make a single large pudding in a basin but divided the mixture evenly between the 6 pudding moulds.

The recipe uses 250g of golden syrup with a little lemon juice, which works out at approximately 40g per pudding, this sounds like quite a lot but as an occasional winter treat it's probably not too bad. The sponge mix was made using 175g each of butter, caster sugar and self raising flour, 3 large eggs with the zest of 1 lemon, the juice of half a lemon and a splash of milk. The syrup was divided between the moulds and the sponge mixture was spooned on top. The puddings were then baked in a baking dish half filled with hot water and covered with foil at 180C for about 55 minutes until the sponges bounced back when lightly pressed. To serve just place each mould upside down in a bowl and leave for 30 seconds before removing the mould. As you can see from the picture below we like a lot of custard. After my recent failure at making my own custard, I wimped out and bought a tin of custard.

I'm entering these into Credit Crunch Munch as they were cheap to make, this challenge is run by Helen and Camilla (this month's host). Also into Forever Nigella this month hosted by Urvashi where the theme is nostalgia and finally into Tea Time Treats run by Karen and Kate (this month's host) where the theme is perfect puddings.