Nadiya Hussain’s Spotted Dick Bread with Homemade Butter
This delicious recipe for bread-meets-spotted dick is a clever twist on the traditional British pudding, and along with the homemade butter it makes a lovely breakfast or teatime treat.
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Introduction
This bread is so easy to make and has all the delicious flavours of a spotted dick. Bread making can be fun and does not have to be laborious. Spotted dick can take a long time to make what with the steaming, but this way you can have those delicious flavours without spending all your time in the kitchen. This is a great time to make your own butter too, seeing as you will have all that time spare.
Ingredients
| For the bread: | |
| 500g | plain flour |
| 1 tsp | salt |
| 2 tbsp | sugar |
| 1 tsp | bicarbonate of soda |
| 50g | vegetarian suet |
| 100g | candied peel |
| 100g | currants |
| 1 | orange, zest only (slice the rest and pop it into a freezer bag for extra flavour in cold drinks) |
| 1 | lemon, zest only (slice as above) |
| 400ml | buttermilk (if you have no buttermilk, you can make your own by adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice to 400ml of whole milk) |
| For the butter: | |
| 600ml | double cream |
| 1 tbsp | sea salt |
Essential kit
You will need: a colander lined with muslin or a thin piece of cotton, a free-standing or hand-held mixer.
Method
If you’re making your own buttermilk, now is the time to do it, to give it time to thicken and do its sciencey thing!
Preheat the oven to 220°C/fan 200°C and line a baking tray with baking paper.
Put the flour, salt, sugar, bicarb, suet, candied peel, currants and citrus zest into a bowl and mix really well. Make a little well in the centre and pour in your buttermilk, using a palette knife to bring the mixture together. Tip it out on to a work surface and gently bring the dough together, without kneading it – you don’t want to overwork it. Place it on to the baking tray and flatten it down, then use a sharp knife to make 4 cuts all the way through, to create 8 triangles. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes.
While it’s baking, make the butter. Put the cream into a mixer, or use a hand-held mixer, and whisk. It will quickly get to stiff peaks – just keep it going and then it will separate. This is exactly what you want. As soon as it does that it will change fast – you will be able to hear it. There will be a lot of sloshing, where the water separates from the fat. What you should be left with is crumbly-looking butter and liquid in the base of the bowl.
Have ready a colander lined with muslin, or a thin piece of cotton. Tip the butter into the colander and leave it for all that excess liquid to drain off.
As the dripping slows down, give it a good squeeze to get rid of some more moisture. Add the salt and mix through, then set aside the amount you need for the bread and refrigerate the rest. It will keep in the fridge for a month.
When the bread comes out of the oven, leave it to cool on a rack for 15 minutes, if you can resist the urge not to eat it straight away. Then pull away the triangular wedges of warm bread and spread them with your fresh butter.
If you have any bread left over, slice it and freeze it. You can pop it straight into the toaster from frozen.
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