Sussex pond Pudding

Why this one?
Basically this dish is a sweet suet pudding with a whole lemon in the middle with loads of butter and sugar - what's not to like, I hear you say.
This dish really was only cooked because of lockdown - it took 3.5 hours of cooking alone! We absolutely would have been too busy, rushing here, there, and everywhere, pre-COVID.
Now this was one of the few sweet dishes in Gizzi' Erskine's SLOW cookbook and it looked like a pudding that reminded me fondly of a dinner my dad once made. One wintery day I came home from school to find my dad had made a beef suet pudding. As with all steamed pudding the unveiling is a ceremony and when it was tuned out on a plate there was this glorious, piping hot, pale golden mound of indulgence. As with most food memories they are always so much more than the taste of the food and in this case I can't really remember what the pudding tasted like but I do remember the feeling. Warmth spreading through me, enveloping me in calmness and contentedness which comes from food being cooked with passion and eaten with love in our hearts. Sorry I digress, so I wanted to make this because I had that warm, fuzzing feeling about suet puddings.

Find the recipe here.....https://www.marksandspencer.com/c/style-and-living/winter-comfort-food-recipes

Any substitutes?
No substitutes however the lemon I used was gigantic (I should have taken a photo) - probably twice the size of a normal lemon. It's just what was available at the market the day I went. I even commented to the greengrocer on the size of his lemons!

The actual cooking of the dish 
So we (my husband and I) started this at about 10AM, thinking we would have this pudding as a bit of an afternoon snack - I'd like to say lockdown has done something weird to me but I would be lying. Cooking a pudding for an afternoon snack is absolutely something I would have done before lockdown.

It was a little bit more complex to follow than some of the other recipes in the SLOW book but that was probably down to the fact that we were both trying to follow different parts of the recipe and then missed bits as we thought the other person would do it.

But all went well in the cooking stage, just combining ingredients to make the dough and lining a pudding basin with it and filling it with the lemon, butter and sugar. We got the pudding into the pan of boiling water ready to steam and set the 3.5 hour timer.

Where I ate it
On the sofa at approximately 14.57. 


What I thought

So its called a pond pudding and the picture in the book showed this lovely lemony sauce surrounding the pudding a bit like a castle and a moat - this did not happen with ours. The first sign perhaps all wasn't quite right. Next, the colour of ours differed. Ours was a gorgeous caramel brown on the top and then a yellow colour on the rest of the pudding whereas  Gizzi's was a very pale cream/yellow all the way over - oh no! The final difference was in the texture of the pud, the pictures in the book showed a smooth pudding but ours looks very holey - not like Jarlsberg cheese holey but like the top of a crumpet.

Anyway, we tried it and I would describe it as a pudding of two parts. The caramel brown top was everything you want in a indulgent 3PM pudding, actually an anytime pudding, it was buttery, sweet and sticky, airy (i'm guessing the holes helped with that) yet deeply comforting. YUM!
But then I got to the other part of the pudding, the lemon bit - it was so bitter., it made me suck my cheeks in like when you eat a sour sweet. For me it wasn't enjoyable. A novice's guess at why this was... the size of our lemon!!!

Difficulty: Medium

Tastiness rating: 4/10

Next time I'd..... possible not do it again but if I did I would try it with a smaller lemon and perhaps mix the dough better so my pudding (hopefully) looked more like the one from the book.