Weekend Cooking: Chocolate Pear Pudding

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. It is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

Last week, I wanted to make a nice and quick desert for my family, and decided to make a Chocolate Pear Pudding from Nigella Lawson’s website. Each month, she has a “Cookalong” where one recipe is featured which readers can make and comment on. The chocolate pear pudding sounded easy and yummy.

It’s a recipe that you can probably make any time, as it needs only some basic cupboard ingredients.

You can read the full recipe on Nigella’s website, but it’s very simple: put some canned pears at the bottom of an oven dish, and cover this with a mixture of flour, cocoa powder, sugar and eggs. Of course, some baking powder too and some bicarbonade of soda, which I was very proud to have.

You see, I haven’t been able to find baking soda in Netherland but in England it’s easy to get hold of. So when I was there over Christmas, it was on my shopping list!

Anyway, you just mix it all (with some vanilla extract) until it becomes smooth. Our dough wasn’t runny enough (or our baking dish was too big) so we weren’t able to cover all the pears, but this didn’t matter. The dough spread out during cooking to fill most of the dish.

What else can I say? It was delicious. Nigella speaks of the need of chocolate sauce but we found it rich enough. It reminded me a lot of brownies (on top of pears, that is!), but the brownies I make don’t contain any flour.

We ate it still warm, with ice cream (just plain vanilla) and it was lovely.