HOW TO COOK PUDDING RECIPES

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF/gas 4 and grease a 1.5-litre baking dish with butter.
2. Peel, core and chop the apples, then place in a pan with 50g of the sugar and 2 tablespoons of water.
3. Cover and cook, stirring now and then, for 8 minutes, or until the apple breaks down. Spoon into your dish, leaving the excess liquid in the pan.
4. Beat the eggs with the remaining 50g of sugar until fluffy, then stir in the vanilla extract, sift in the flour and spice and fold together.
5. Pour the batter over the apples and bake for 30 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes out clean from the sponge.
6. Dust with icing sugar before serving. Delicious served hot with ice cream or custard.

1. Heat the oven to 180ºC/160ºC Fan. Butter an ovenproof dish (mine measures 26 x 17 x 5cm, though any ovenproof dish of the same depth, with a 1.5 litre capacity would be fine).

2. Put the butter, sugar, rice flour, ground almonds, salt, baking powder and eggs into a processor. Finely grate over the zest of the lemon and blitz until you have a thick batter. Pour the 4 tablespoons of yoghurt and the 2 tablespoons of elderflower cordial through the funnel of the processor, with the motor still going, until combined.

3. If you don’t have a processor, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until smooth, light and aerated. Mix the flour, ground almonds and salt together, add just 1 teaspoon of baking powder; you don’t need as much for the non-processor variant, as you’re whipping more air into the batter. Beat 1 egg into the butter mixture, and when that’s combined, beat in a third of your dry ingredients, and carry on in like manner until eggs and dry ingredients are used up. Finally, beat in the yoghurt and the 2 tablespoons of elderflower cordial.

4. Pour and scrape this fragrant, slightly nubbly and quite delicious batter into your prepared dish and bake for approx. 25 minutes, by which time the top of the pudding should have turned a deep golden brown, and the edges – themselves a darker bronze by this stage –will have started coming away from the sides of the dish and a cake tester should come out clean. Check on it at around 20 minutes and loosely cover with foil if it’s getting too dark.

5. While the pudding is in the oven, prepare the drizzle. Mix 3 tablespoons of juice from the zested lemon and 100ml of elderflower cordial in a jug.

6. When the pudding is cooked, prick all over with your cake tester, though a stick of spaghetti would do (it’s a wonderful stand-in cake tester as it is), and then very gradually pour the syrup over the pudding so that it sinks in slowly and doesn’t pool.

7. Allow the syrup to soak in, and serve the pudding warm with double cream.