Nigella iPhone app

The inspiration for this salted caramel sponge pudding came from Nigella Lawson’s new recipe for salted caramel sauce which appears on her up-dated iPhone app.

Oooh, it’s really yummy, but be very careful when adding the salt, stick to the lower amount unless you’re really, really sure you need that extra salt.
even though mine was delicious, it was far too salty..(My own fault, I admit)

Nigella’s Salted Caramel Sauce

75g salted butter
50g soft light brown sugar
50g caster sugar
50g golden syrup
125ml double cream
0.5-1.5 tsp finest salt.

Melt the butter, both sugars and the golden syrup in a pan and let it simmer for 3 minutes. Stir it now and again. The sauce will slightly darken as it cooks.
Carefully add the cream, then half a tsp of salt and swirl around again.
Carefully taste it before adding any more salt (Watch you don’t burn yourself!)
Pour into a serving jug. And serve, maybe over a plain cake, or ice-cream, or how about making a caramel pudding?

do this by pouring some of the sauce to cover the bottom of an ovenproof pie dish, then make up a plain sponge by mixing together:

125g soft butter
125g caster sugar
125g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs.

(I used Nigella’s sponge recipe for the little lemon puddings, adapted slightly)
Spoon over the caramel sauce, don’t worry if it doesn’t cover the sauce perfectly, it will spread as it cooks.

Bake at 180deg.C. for about 20 minutes, then pour the rest of the caramel sauce over it as it comes out of the oven.
The sauce will be mostly absorbed, yum…sigh……heaven!

Let it cool slightly before digging in…..you don’t want to burn your mouth do you?

I need to start this post off by letting you know that I have a Facebook group called:

‘NEW Yes, I do take photos of my food. I admit it’.

Which you are most welcome to join (Just let me know that you found out about the group via this blog) There are quite a few active members in the group who love posting their food pics as much as I do! It’s really nice to see what they’ve cooked and their thoughts on it, be they good or, occasionally, bad.
Hazzer New Zealand, one of the members posted a pic of their lemon curd just the other day, and you know how it is. From that moment on, I couldn’t get lemon curd out of my head!!!! I just had to make it.
Hazzer has posted the recipe on the Facebook group, which was adapted from Rachel Allen’s orange curd recipe.
It was simple to make, but not without a certain level of stress which only surfaced when I started noticing a very few bits of egg in the curd! Had it started curdling? Read on, dear reader…..

I started off by whisking 2 eggs with 1 egg yolk:

I then gently melted the 100g of butter in a saucepan and added the 175g of caster sugar to it, the finely grated zest and juice of 3 lemons:
(I wish my lemons had been erm, yellower….but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the finished curd)

I then poured in the eggs….

This is where the stress came in folks….while I kept it on a low/medium heat and stirred for about 15 minutes, I began noticing little bits of white egg…

I should have added the eggs much more slowly. I should know that by now.
It’s one of the cardinal rules of cookery:

ADD EGGS SLOWLY TO HOT LIQUIDS.

Aaaaaagggghhhhhhhh.

Quickly, I took it off the heat, and passed the whole lot through a sieve, which caught the egg, but also the zest!
I fiddled through the eggy zest, got rid of the egg, then added the zest back to the curd and put the curd back on to heat.
By this time I’d started getting really hot, opening windows and perspiring!
I kept it on the heat for slightly longer than 15 minutes just to make sure that it would set.
You can see from this pic that the consistency has changed, becoming thicker and ‘set’.

Phew.

Another crisis averted!
The curd went into a disposable plastic container, which had just been through the dishwasher (Sterilized? I don’t know. But at least spotlessly clean!)

Now I’d got the curd all done, I couldn’t shake off thoughts of making Nigella’s little lemon puddings which I’d seen on the up-dated version of her iPhone app.
A little voice in my head kept crying out ‘Make them, make them, MAKE THEM!’

I had planned to at least wait until the day after to make them.

But it didn’t work out that way.

I barely gave the curd a chance to cool down and set.

Sigh, there’s no hope for me is there?

I placed about a (generous) tablespoon of the curd in the bottom of 6 lightly greased non-stick ramekins.
Then made up the lemon sponge mixture. Nigella says to whizz it all up in the processor, but I just made it the old-fashioned way, by hand in a bowl.

The lemon sponge ingredients are:

125 g soft butter
125g caster sugar
125g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 lemon, juice and finely grated zest.

Divide the sponge mixture between the ramekins, place them on a baking tray and bake at 180 deg. C. for 20 minutes.
Turn the little puddings out and enjoy!