Sticky Toffee Cake

When we discussed what dessert to make for a holiday dinner we were hosting for a few friends, sticky toffee pudding came to mind.  I found this New York Times recipe for Sticky Toffee Whole-Wheat Date Cake.  It has whole wheat flour in it, so it's good for you too, right?

I made fun individual sticky tofee puddings a few years back that were so amazingly good and this was even easier making as one big cake.  The individual cakes seem to stay more moist, but the toffee sauce was good to drizzle over the entire cake and a little extra on each piece. It was the perfect sweet ending to a lovely holiday meal.

Pudding Filled Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes a while ago and just didn't think they were quite worthy of blogging about.  Not that anything I make is a pastry masterpiece, but some turn out better than others.  These tasted really good (or so the kids told us), but I wasn't as happy with the ganache topping or the writing I attempted to do on them.  They are my modern take on the Hostess cupcake.  I haven't made many filled cupcakes, so I thought I'd try.  I wanted to take some treats in for little A's last day at her cousin's school.  My original thought was to do writing on the top saying "Bye" and "Farewell" and so on. But, the white chocolate writing pen I had didn't work out as easily as I'd though.  So, we ended up with some messy squigglies resembling the Hostess cupcakes of our childhood.

They were yummy chocolate cupcakes made from Martha Stewart's one bowl chocolate cupcake recipe.

With some of them, we hollowed out the center with this special cupcake gutting tool.  The others, we simply injected them with the pudding filling.  I used an instant vanilla pudding mixture for something more moist vs. using buttercream.

Instead of frosting the cupcakes, the glaze looked so nice and good for writing on (had it worked out better), but I didn't follow the instructions thoroughly and used less heavy cream since it looked too thin.  I think it would have been even more smooth and easy to glaze if I'd used the correct amount. They still looked alright and most importantly they tasted good still.

So chocolaty and shiny!

The centers had a nice amount of pudding in them!

Here is my attempt at the Hostess squigglies.  Not too bad, but not the beautiful cursive white chocolate messages that I had imagined.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

While all desserts are commonly referred to as "puddings" in England, this is actually not a pudding as we know it, but more of a cake. It is indeed sticky though, especially with the molasses infused toffee sauce. And, what English dessert (I mean pudding) would be complete without the addition of some type of sauce, be it custard, toffee, caramel or cream!? I've ordered this dessert at a restaurant in England and was interested to try making it myself. On a recent visit to my mum, I made this for her and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.

The other sticky ingredient in this dessert are the dates. The first step was to take the pitted dates and boil them with some water and baking soda to soften them. They were added in with the other ingredients as the basis for the cake batter.

The recipe I used, indicated baking one large cake in a mold, but I have this pan with the cute individual bundt cakes and decided to try that. It worked quite well, but I probably could have put just a little less batter in each one.

They baked perfectly though and came out of the pan just right (thanks to Pam Baking spray). I made the toffee sauce with dark brown sugar, molasses and heavy cream. It turned out very good, but I would probably try corn syrup or something else instead of molasses next time as with the high molasses content of the dark brown sugar it had a stronger flavour. I drizzled (and eventually poured) the sauce on top of the pretty little cakes to let them soak in the creamy sauce - sticky goodness!