Sticky Toffee Pudding: A World Renowned Dessert
One day there was a lady from Chicago in the store. She had just spent two months in England. (Hmm, I didn’t know that Idaho was a stopping point between Chicago and London.)
Anyway, she had fallen in love with Sticky Toffee Pudding, had it almost every night she said. We happened to be serving free puddings in the store that day. (We’re kind of crazy that way.)
“You nailed it,” she said. “Tastes just like England.”
What is Sticky Toffee Pudding?
A sticky toffee pudding is like a dense snacking cake with fruit added. Then it’s covered with a sticky toffee sauce.
The original sticky toffee pudding is made with dates and this may still be the best—but we have yet to find a sticky toffee pudding recipe that we didn’t like.
The Key to Sticky Toffee Pudding is the Sauce
It’s the toffee sauce that makes this dessert. The first time I made it, it didn’t turn out. The topping was too wet, more of thick sauce, and it soaked into the pudding-cake. Not that it wasn’t good—it was like a warm caramel sauce over cake or maybe a poke cake. The topping needs to be thicker, more like frosting.
The original recipe calls for putting the dessert with the topping back in the oven so that it melts the topping and makes it stickier. After a while, we quit doing that and liked it just as much as long as we had a thick sauce on top to begin with. The folks in the store couldn’t tell the difference.
Experimenting with Sticky Toffee Pudding
Once we understood the keys to sticky toffee pudding, we got busy experimenting, adding everything but the kitchen sink to our pudding. The one at the right is made with chopped Snickers© candy bars.
Yes, we often make sticky toffee pudding as cupcakes.
And we almost always add caramel whipped cream on top. It’s incredible. Just make vanilla whipped cream substituting brown sugar for the granulated and caramel flavor for the vanilla.
From Experimentation to a Sticky Toffee Pudding Mix
We started with recipes, really good recipes. Of course, we served them in the store. They proved so popular that we developed a sticky toffee pudding mix. We stuck with the original recipe, including dates in the mix.
If you choose to use the mix, you will add eggs, water, and oil to for the cake and butter for the sauce. It’s easy and it’s very, very good.
The mix makes a 9×13-inch dessert instead of the 8×8-inch called for in the recipes below. If you would like to make individual desserts, you can make them as cupcakes in a muffin pan or in ramekins.
Sticky Toffee Pudding Baker’s Notes & Serving Suggestions
We served the banana sticky toffee pudding topped with banana slices and butterscotch whipped cream. Butterscotch whipped cream is absolutely luscious and matched up perfectly with this recipe.
To make the peach/mango sticky toffee pudding, we used the zucchini recipe judging that the water content of the peaches or mango was more like zucchini than bananas. We substituted peaches for the zucchini and added a little nutmeg. It worked perfectly.
We served the peach/mango pudding with freshly sliced fruit and brown sugar whipped cream. Brown sugar whipped cream is made the same as butterscotch whipped cream except that brown sugar flavor is substituted for butterscotch flavor. Butterscotch whipped cream would have been excellent.
We made a batch of plum sticky toffee pudding simply for pictures and therefore used our Candy Apple Springform Pan to make a picture-perfect dessert. (The area in a nine-inch springform pan is the same as an 8 x 8-inch square pan so you can make the substitution without making adjustments in the recipe. A nine-inch springform pan works perfectly for all three of the recipes in this article.) Again we served it with butterscotch whipped cream.
