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Strawberry Cottage Pudding
1/3 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1 3/4 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Mix same as Cottage Pudding, and bake twenty-five minutes in shallow pan; cut in squares and serve with strawberries (sprinkled with sugar and slightly mashed) and Cream Sauce I. Sliced peaches may be used in place of strawberries.
A plain butter cake baked thin and served warm under fruit and sauce. The original leans on the book's basic Cottage Pudding for method and gives no oven temperature, so the two things worth settling before you start are the mixing order and the heat.
- The method it refers toCottage Pudding is a creamed batter: butter and sugar beaten until light, then the egg, then the flour sifted with the baking powder and the milk. Check the book's own Cottage Pudding for the exact order, which may add the milk and flour alternately. Mix only until the flour disappears; this batter turns tough quickly.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. For a shallow pan in twenty-five minutes, 350-375F is a reasonable modern choice. A tester in the centre should come out clean and the edges should just pull from the sides.
- Pan size"Shallow pan" here means roughly an 8- or 9-inch square, giving a cake about an inch thick. A deeper pan will need longer and defeats the point of cutting it into squares.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is a heavy hand by modern standards, though not unusable. Two teaspoons gives a lighter crumb with less of the metallic aftertaste.
- Cream Sauce IThis is the book's own dessert sauce, so look it up rather than assuming; in books of this kind it is a sweet cream-based sauce, not a savoury white sauce. Failing that, a thin vanilla custard or lightly sweetened cream serves the same purpose.
- The strawberriesSprinkle with sugar and crush lightly at least half an hour ahead so they give up juice. That syrup soaking into the warm cake is the whole effect; berries added at the last minute sit on top and do nothing.
- Serving and yieldAn 8-inch square cuts into nine generous squares or twelve small ones. Serve warm, within an hour or two of baking -- reheated cottage pudding is dry.
- The peach variationSliced peaches need the same treatment: sugared and left to stand until juicy. Firm supermarket peaches will not release enough liquid, so use ripe fruit or add a spoonful of their own juice.