Quick Store-cupboard Desserts

Here are two recommendations for quickly made hot desserts, using ingredients which are likely to be in most store cupboards and fridges, or which can be bought and kept in reserve for when you need a quick pudding idea.

I found this first recipe, for Stem Ginger Sponge and Sticky Orange Syrup while looking for a recipe to use up half a tin of condensed milk, leftover from making the Almost-Candy Bars. I was slightly perturbed by making a sponge with no sugar, but once the syrup had soaked in the sweetness was just right. The cake was dense and puddingy, but there's nothing wrong with that occasionally! The ginger and orange flavours combined together well, but I think you could also make a delicious Orange dessert by leaving out the ginger, adding the orange zest, grated, to the sponge mix and using more marmalade in the syrup instead of the ginger syrup.

No photograph for this next dessert, as it was all eaten straight from the oven; the classic Lemon Surprise Pudding. The version I use is from Delia Smith's Cookery Course, which is a smaller version of her online recipe for Hot Citrus Pudding, made using two large lemons instead of a mixture of oranges, lemons and limes. For the smaller lemon pudding use 2 eggs, 50g butter, 110g caster sugar, 2 large lemons, 50g flour and 150ml milk.

If you Google for Lemon Surprise Pudding, there seems to be a lot of criticism of this sort of recipe not working very well. Occasionally, when I've made the recipe it han't made a lot of sauce, but I think the recipe only works well with a lot of lemon juice - if you're not sure your lemons are 'large', then err on the side of excess and use three! It's one of those recipes where the amount of juice really should be given as a volume rather than a number of lemons.

For an interesting experimental variation, this time, I poured the pudding batter over a chopped ripe mango, which worked very well. The pieces of mango stayed in the puddle of lemon sauce beneath the spongey topping.