Bettina's Baked Cottage Pudding

From A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband

I've tried versions of Cottage Pudding before and always found them too dry or bland--I prefer baking muffin batter in a pan if I want something quite plain, or vanilla microwave cake, or maybe the biscuit batter from our shortcake recipe. But Bettina's version--with a couple of adaptations for 2010--is quite good, and three out of five Squirrels would like to have it again. Mama Squirrel was unsure of the amounts on this, but it made plenty--especially because only three out of five squirrels tried it.

Bettina's Baked Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce

1 cup flour
1 2/3 tsp. baking powder (who wants to measure that? I just put in about 2 tsp.)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup sugar
1 well-beaten egg
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp. melted butter (I used canola oil)
1/4 tsp. vanilla or lemon extract (I used lemon)

"Mix dry ingredients, add egg and milk. Beat well and add melted butter and extract. Bake 25 minutes in a well buttered mould. Serve hot with the following sauce...." My notes: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease or spray a small lidded casserole, and bake for about half an hour or until the edges are pulling away from the pan. Let it stay in the pan while you make the sauce.

Lemon Sauce

1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tbsp. flour (I used about 2 tbsp.)
1/2 tsp. salt (I used about half that)
1 cup hot water
1 tsp. butter or to taste
1 tsp. lemon extract or 1/2 tsp. lemon juice (I used 1/2 tsp. lemon extract and that was plenty)

With a whisk, combine dry ingredients in a saucepan. Slowly add the hot water. Cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (this only takes a few minutes if you start with hot water). Mix in the butter and flavouring.

Now I'm sure Bettina would have nicely unmoulded her pudding and then served it drizzled with some of the sauce, maybe passing the rest in one of her wedding-china sauce servers. But this is what I did: I left the cake in the pan, went around the edges with a sharp knife and also sort of cut through it three times each way. Then I just poured all the sauce over the top and served it from the pan.

(And now you know why housewives were so happy to discover self-saucing puddings!)