The idea of self saucing seems pretty simple, there are few ingredients for these simple little lemon pots so what can possibly go wrong?

Like I said in my previous post (about the show), I’ve made chocolate fondants before and they are lovely but they can be very rich and filling. Fondants are great for warming you up in winter and the gooey liquid centre is a great surprise (especially when it works). However seeing as it I’m trying to be hopeful in thinking that the summer isn’t over, I’ve decided to go with the other self saucing method, to create a pudding that makes it’s own sauce in the bottom of the dish. Using the inspiration of summer I decided to go with zesty lemon as the main flavour with a few additions.

Testing, testing
The bakers on the show would have had time to develop a recipe and practice with the flavours, so I’m going to do a few variations with these little puds. It’s nothing fancy but I’ve been tossing with the idea of adding raspberries and poppyseeds. I don’t think they’ll go brilliantly together so I’m going to try plain lemon, lemon and poppyseed, lemon and raspberry. I have concerns about the poppyseed, as to whether they will sink to the bottom of the pudding in the cooking process and end up as a seedy layer in the sauce. Also will the raspberries hold or create a burning jam like substance in the bottom of the dish? Only one way to find out…

All new things
The first part of the job is to separate the egg yolks from the whites. It’s a messy job, which can either be done with the aid of the shells, your fingers or a nifty gadget if you have one. I prefer the egg shell method but it can pierce the yolk membrane, so it was the messy finger method for this. Once separated the next part was to cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest. Easy, however there didn’t really seem to be enough butter to cream to the usual light and fluffy consistency that is calls for when making regular sponges. After a period of whisking it still looked grainy, but seeing as this is all new, I’m going to go with it and trust the recipe.

Next I added the yolks, lemon juice and milk, mixing the whole thing together until well combined. What I was left with was a thin batter that needed to be poured and folded into stiff but not firm egg whites. Looking back now, I think it would have been better to fold the egg whites into the batter, as it would have blended better rather than look like cottage cheese!

Thinking ahead
Along with trying out the different variations on flavour, I’m going to try a few variations on the presentation too. In light of this I will use ceramic ramekins to serve the pudding in the pot and silver pudding basins to tip the pudding out into a plate.  Three silver darioles and a ramekin had a few raspberries put in be bottom, the rest were left empty.

Once there pudding mixture was mixed I ladled it into each of the pots, until I had two remaining. In these two I wanted to try out the lemon poppyseed combo, so I added a tablespoon of seeds into the remaining mix then poured that into the remaining pots. The pots need to be cooked in a water bath, or if you prefer to more fancy term, a bain–marie. This basically means putting the tins in a roasting tins and pouring in some boiling water to the halfway mark.  Then its into the oven.

Size matters
The recipe that I am using as a guide, is making a giant pudding, cooking it in a large pie dish.  There is very little difference between making a large pudding and a mini pudding, but I’m concerned about the timings.  The large pudding requires 35 minutes cooking, so the smaller times should take less time right?

Nicely does it
Once they puddings had been in for 25 minutes I took one out to test it.  They had a soufflé esqe quality to them for sure, which made them wonderfully light and fluffy.  The test pudding was a from a silver pot, so it needed to loosened and tipped onto a plate.  Bad move, as you can see from what can only be described as a splat it needed a little longer in there oven. SO I left the rest to cook for the same length of time as a large pudding needed.

Second time lucky?
The next pudding to tip out again, had better hold, but was definitely not attractive. Overall I think these desserts are definitely better kept in the ramekins.  The raspberries gave a nice sweetness to the sharpness of the lemons. The poppyseed variation worked too, and the seeds stayed in the batter, rather than sinking and the seeds gave it a nice crunch too.

These are not the best looking desserts in the world but they are certainly fresh and zingy which is what I wanted.