We’re falling for autumn this season with a real treat for you. It’s baked to a golden brown, and warms up the whole kitchen for a good hour or 2. No, we aren’t baking pies or cookies. Funny as it seems to our US ears, it’s apple pudding fresh from the oven.
When we North Americans hear the word pudding, we think of cold creamy globs of chocolate, vanilla and tapioca covered with sprinkles or dolloped with whipped cream. As for some English folks, (I’m part English by the way.) puddings are like the cousin of brownies. It’s more like cake.
No better apple orchard than Bowman’s I say. We cracked open their apple-lovers’ cookbook to the “Quick and Easy Pudding”. Boy, were we surprised to see the word BAKE at the bottom. This one sweetened the palette.
We had a laugh mushing the sugar, flour, baking powder and apples together. I even licked the spatula. Jeremy licked the sides a bit. We had to give it a taste after all. If the powder tastes too strong in the batter, then there have to be some adjustments. That’s what knocked that guy out of the Halloween Baking Championship finale, even if his pumpkin cakes were cute and had his nieces’ names on the leaves.
As to how it tasted, it was a very sweet treat. We took half a slice each to avoid an after-lunch sugar-rush. It felt like we had gotten a fresh-made apple version of a coffee cake with a hard crust and gooey filling. I can’t figure out where the switch was made in semantics. How about you, Lauren?
Here’s the scoop: It was at first, a meat-loaded stomach of some beast cooked into a “Podding”. Then the pronunciation thus the word became pudding, and lastly, someone made a dessert-version, but there are some more wholesome options like a bloody black pudding with sausage, sweet treacle tarts like in Harry Potter, a Yorkshire pudding that tastes like southern meat and gravy, and the suet pudding full of fatty beef or mutton.
YUCK! I’m glad we don’t have to deal with anything as grotesque as an animal’s stomach. US and Canada pudding is milk-based custard with maybe a few sprinkles on top, but I always like a nice vanilla-cinnamon blend. The apples were nice and ripe, not too mushy, but I wouldn’t have minded because some fruits get sweeter as they age, like bananas. It will be something to try. My question is: When is an apple just right to be baked, but not to the point of so mushy, they can only be applesauce?
We’ll have to see for ourselves I guess. Macs are already pretty soft, but everyone says to use granny smith apples for their hard texture and tart taste. This means research, and that means more EXPERIMENTATION!
“PULL THE LEVER KRONK!” <Cartoon pitfall> “Wrong lever!”