Choc Sponge Pud

I love British puds and traditional food in general so when I found out about a new blogging challenge called the Great British Pudding Challenge I had to consider joining. The first challenge is a chocolate sponge pudding. Such a hardship !

I haven't made many sponge puds since I stopped eating gluten and the few I have were done by the microwave method which while it is fast didn't give me that good a result. However when I started cooking gluten free anything resembling the real thing was good enough so they filled a gap but now I am more picky as the flours are available to do better than that and my confidence has grown to try adapting recipes.

This recipe is done by the traditional steaming method which takes much longer but all the best things take time and once the mix is made up all you need to do is make sure the steamer doesn't run out of water so can be getting on with other things which in my case was cooking tea, we had lamb chops with a salad. For a steamer I used a large pasta pan, one of those with an internal pan like a colander which can be pulled out to drain the pasta or in this case to lift the pudding basin away from the steam.

The original none gluten free recipe is here. All I did was to replace the flour with a gluten free general flour mix and it worked very well. The mixture is easy to make up and the resultant pudding is very chocolaty indeed. I used Bornville Chocolate for the chunks as I love dark chocolate. The texture was very good and light though I think from seeing pictures of a couple of others mine might be a little more crumbly than a gluten version but not so much it spoilt the feel in the mouth.

We all ate it with cream though I suspect had Tom not been feeling low with a cold he would have made custard to go with it as well.

My small one insisted on being pictured with the pudding as well sorry it's rather dark it was getting close to his bedtime so I wanted to get it served up.