Recipe: Oaty Sticky Toffee Pudding using Hamlyn’s Scottish Oatmeal

Along with a few fellow bloggers, I had the opportunity to appear in a leaflet for the Scottish Royal Highland Show this year.

Hamlyns of Scotland, who commissioned the leaflet, kindly gave me permission to post my recipe on my blog too.  Here it is, the front cover of the leaflet, which apparently went down very well, and the recipe and images from making sticky toffee pudding with some oaty goodness in it.

I think I might even try replacing all the flour with oatmeal at my next attempt with this.  The consistency might be different, but as I love the nutty taste of oatmeal, I suspect it would go down very well here.

Oaty Sticky Toffee Pudding Recipe

Ingredients

For the pudding.

• 200g Medjool Dates, stones removed.
• 100g Self Raising Flour.
• 100g Hamlyns Scottish Oatmeal.
• 150ml Boiling Water.
• 2 Teaspoons Bicarbonate of Soda.
• 2 Eggs.
• 100g Butter.
• 2 Tablespoons Black Treacle.
• 150g Demerara Sugar.
• 100ml Double Cream.

For the toffee sauce.

• 350g Golden Caster Sugar.
• 100g Butter, cubed.
• 500ml Double Cream.
• 1 Tablespoon Black Treacle.

Method

For the pudding.

1. Chop the dates into small pieces. Put them into a bowl and pour over the boiling water and set them aside.  Leave them to soak in until everything else is done.
2. Put your oven on, to around 170C/160C (Fan).
3. In a mixing bowl, add your flour, oatmeal, bicarbonate of soda and sugar, and stir it around. Melt your butter so that it’s easy to mix in, and add it, along with your eggs and black treacle.  Mix by hand, or use a low setting on a mixer, to ensure the mix isn’t handled too roughly.  When the pudding mix looks slightly curdled, add in the double cream and fold it in by hand.  Don’t worry about the texture.  At this point, it might resemble batter more than pudding mix.  Just remember, that it isn’t a cake mix and doesn’t need lots of air added.  Using a spatula to scrape the sides and bottom of your bowl is a good idea.
4. Mash the dates into the water, then pour it all into the bowl with the rest of your ingredients. Again, fold in by hand.  The mix may look curdled, but it’s fine.
5. Grease your baking tins and pour the mixture in. I used two moulds.  One traditional round pudding mould and a flat one for the family to tuck into as soon as our toffee pudding was ready.
6. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the pudding is cooked.

For the toffee sauce.

1. In a thick bottomed pan, add the sugar and butter with around three quarters of the cream, then slowly bring to the boil, stirring all the time.
2. When the sugar is dissolved, add the black treacle and bring the mix to the boil, letting it bubble for a minute or two at the most.
3. Take the sauce off the heat and beat in the remaining cream. Your mix will be a gorgeous toffee colour, and look lovely and glossy.

Combining the pudding and sauce.

1. Slide a knife or spatula around the edges of your cakes, and slide them out of the tins if possible. If a little of the cake sticks to the bottom, its fine.  Just use your spatula to scrape it out and pop it on top, then use a knife to smooth it out.  The pudding is gooey and it will repair easily and can even be slightly moulded if needed.  Toffee sauce is going on the top, and it will hide any slight imperfection.  If in doubt, wait until your pudding is cooler before attempting to remove it from the mould.
2. Pour a little toffee sauce into the bottom of your moulds. Replace your pudding, letting it sit in the toffee sauce, then pour some more on top.  Keep aside around one third of the toffee sauce for serving.
3. If you’ve left the pudding overnight to soak up the toffee sauce, it will be more sticky and gooey than if eaten immediately. If you want to heat the pudding up before serving, that’s fine too.
4. Enjoy on its own, or with a little yoghurt and strawberries.