Nigella Lawson’s Warm Lemon and Elderflower Pudding
This Warm Lemon and Elderflower Pudding, as featured on Nigella Lawson's BBC2 series Cook, Eat, Repeat, is tangy, fragrant, and especially good served with double cream.
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Cook, Eat, Repeat
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Introduction
I’ve been making lemon drizzle cake the same way for decades, and up until now had never felt any urge to alter one single little thing. (Actually, I tried for some time to come up with a grapefruit drizzle cake, but I found it an unworthy alternative to the original lemon version.) But life changes, as do we, and I began to wonder whether a lemon and elderflower variation would be interesting. I’m glad to report that it is a delight: that necessary stinging sharpness is undimmed, but the elderflower adds a subtle sweet floral note that seems to give it a tender delicacy.
Served warm with double cream, this makes one of the best Sunday lunch puddings you will ever eat. You should be able to feed four to six lucky people out of this, but if there are fewer of you, leftovers microwave most satisfactorily.
Ingredients
| For the pudding: | |
| 175g | soft unsalted butter |
| 150g | caster sugar |
| 100g | rice flour (or plain flour if you don’t need this to be gluten-free) |
| 75g | ground almonds |
| A pinch of | fine sea salt |
| 1½ tsp | baking powder (gluten-free if necessary) |
| 3 | large eggs, at room temperature |
| 1 | large lemon |
| 2 x 15ml tbsp | undiluted elderflower cordial |
| 4 x 15ml tbsp | full-fat Greek yoghurt |
| For the drizzle: | |
| 3 x 15ml tbsp of | juice from the lemon, above |
| 100ml | undiluted elderflower cordial |
Essential kit
You will need: an ovenproof dish, roughly 26 x 17 x 5cm, with a 1.5 litre capacity
Method
1. Heat the oven to 180ºC/160ºC Fan. Butter an ovenproof dish (mine measures 26 x 17 x 5cm, though any ovenproof dish of the same depth, with a 1.5 litre capacity would be fine).
2. Put the butter, sugar, rice flour, ground almonds, salt, baking powder and eggs into a processor. Finely grate over the zest of the lemon and blitz until you have a thick batter. Pour the 4 tablespoons of yoghurt and the 2 tablespoons of elderflower cordial through the funnel of the processor, with the motor still going, until combined.
3. If you don’t have a processor, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until smooth, light and aerated. Mix the flour, ground almonds and salt together, add just 1 teaspoon of baking powder; you don’t need as much for the non-processor variant, as you’re whipping more air into the batter. Beat 1 egg into the butter mixture, and when that’s combined, beat in a third of your dry ingredients, and carry on in like manner until eggs and dry ingredients are used up. Finally, beat in the yoghurt and the 2 tablespoons of elderflower cordial.
4. Pour and scrape this fragrant, slightly nubbly and quite delicious batter into your prepared dish and bake for approx. 25 minutes, by which time the top of the pudding should have turned a deep golden brown, and the edges – themselves a darker bronze by this stage –will have started coming away from the sides of the dish and a cake tester should come out clean. Check on it at around 20 minutes and loosely cover with foil if it’s getting too dark.
5. While the pudding is in the oven, prepare the drizzle. Mix 3 tablespoons of juice from the zested lemon and 100ml of elderflower cordial in a jug.
6. When the pudding is cooked, prick all over with your cake tester, though a stick of spaghetti would do (it’s a wonderful stand-in cake tester as it is), and then very gradually pour the syrup over the pudding so that it sinks in slowly and doesn’t pool.
7. Allow the syrup to soak in, and serve the pudding warm with double cream.
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