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Chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding
And... again my alarm failed to go off in time for me to get to market, after successfully ringing every time for a couple of weeks (but alas, the market was closed last week). I'd started to think that whatever-it-was had stopped happening :-(
My heating has been coming on all this week, and I was finally stung into completing the Great Changeover, having as usual been making do for several weeks with just the thermal underwear, by the sight of a hard white frost all over the roofs! So I am currently wearing my really warm dressing-gown instead of the summer one plus a rug round my shoulders...
I discovered from the manual that the flashing bar which had appeared on the left-hand side of my fancy wireless thermostat system was a low battery indicator, despite the fact that it is only a year since I last had to change the batteries -- I did remember about needing a coin, although I didn't have any 2p coins on me and a modern 10p was barely large enough. So of course I then had to go through re-programming all the preset temperature defaults and looking up what the Centigrade settings actually equated to, since '12C' and '7C' mean nothing to me in terms of desired room temperature; all I could recall was that the temperature to which the heating was supposed to be set when it was *on* was 15.5C, whereas the system defaults to a highly excessive 21C, presumably for those who like to walk around in short sleeves in the winter :-O
I improvised a 'chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding' by combining the recipes for wartime beetroot pudding and 1960s upside-down pineapple pudding (and adding an ounce of cocoa). The beetroot pudding is made with half an ounce of fat, an ounce of sugar, and '6oz wheatmeal flour' to 4oz grated beetroot, and tastes precisely as chewy and uninteresting as one might imagine :-p But I thought adding the chopped pear and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup (which took *forever* to extract from a squeezy bottle) might liven it up.
I was in two minds as to whether I ought to precook the pear, since the pineapple is assumed to be tinned, but didn't, on the grounds that the juices would improve the flavour. The result was of course that the pudding came out pretty wet, and probably a bit undercooked in the middle even after an extra ten minutes' cooking time and testing with a cocktail stick. But I was worried that the bottom/top was drying out too much... It also leaked a good deal despite the cake tin's being lined with a disc of greaseproof paper; I had thought that it would be easier to invert the cooked pudding if I used a tin with a loose bottom, but this was probably a mistake. Fortunately the juices simply pooled in the (recently washed) grill pan stored on the shelf below, and I was able to pour them back over the top afterwards.
As you can see from the photo, I'm not sure that the pear pieces in the middle were completely cooked at that point, but after the cut pudding had been left to cool down in its own juices for an hour or so, all the pear had gone completely translucent and the flavour of the whole had definitely improved, although of course it had become even soggier! The beetroot section on its own really is exceedingly insipid, although the grated vegetable ought in theory to make it moist and tender. And one ounce of cocoa probably isn't enough to make it anything other than simply brown.
My heating has been coming on all this week, and I was finally stung into completing the Great Changeover, having as usual been making do for several weeks with just the thermal underwear, by the sight of a hard white frost all over the roofs! So I am currently wearing my really warm dressing-gown instead of the summer one plus a rug round my shoulders...
I discovered from the manual that the flashing bar which had appeared on the left-hand side of my fancy wireless thermostat system was a low battery indicator, despite the fact that it is only a year since I last had to change the batteries -- I did remember about needing a coin, although I didn't have any 2p coins on me and a modern 10p was barely large enough. So of course I then had to go through re-programming all the preset temperature defaults and looking up what the Centigrade settings actually equated to, since '12C' and '7C' mean nothing to me in terms of desired room temperature; all I could recall was that the temperature to which the heating was supposed to be set when it was *on* was 15.5C, whereas the system defaults to a highly excessive 21C, presumably for those who like to walk around in short sleeves in the winter :-O
I improvised a 'chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding' by combining the recipes for wartime beetroot pudding and 1960s upside-down pineapple pudding (and adding an ounce of cocoa). The beetroot pudding is made with half an ounce of fat, an ounce of sugar, and '6oz wheatmeal flour' to 4oz grated beetroot, and tastes precisely as chewy and uninteresting as one might imagine :-p But I thought adding the chopped pear and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup (which took *forever* to extract from a squeezy bottle) might liven it up.
I was in two minds as to whether I ought to precook the pear, since the pineapple is assumed to be tinned, but didn't, on the grounds that the juices would improve the flavour. The result was of course that the pudding came out pretty wet, and probably a bit undercooked in the middle even after an extra ten minutes' cooking time and testing with a cocktail stick. But I was worried that the bottom/top was drying out too much... It also leaked a good deal despite the cake tin's being lined with a disc of greaseproof paper; I had thought that it would be easier to invert the cooked pudding if I used a tin with a loose bottom, but this was probably a mistake. Fortunately the juices simply pooled in the (recently washed) grill pan stored on the shelf below, and I was able to pour them back over the top afterwards.
As you can see from the photo, I'm not sure that the pear pieces in the middle were completely cooked at that point, but after the cut pudding had been left to cool down in its own juices for an hour or so, all the pear had gone completely translucent and the flavour of the whole had definitely improved, although of course it had become even soggier! The beetroot section on its own really is exceedingly insipid, although the grated vegetable ought in theory to make it moist and tender. And one ounce of cocoa probably isn't enough to make it anything other than simply brown.
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