curiouswombat | Birthday Greetings.

Did you make it? It looks so very very delectable.

Oooh! Did you make that? It's gorgeous and I'm drooling. And if you could maybe chuck the recipe my way...*puppy dog eyes* :)

I have to admit that the one I made earlier this week got eaten before I thought to take its picture - and I didn't put a pretty sprig on the top! But it did turn out properly so looked quite a lot like this one - which I think might have been made by Delia.

Summer pudding is one of my daughter's favourites and fits in nicely with our current healthy eating regime!

I have to admit that I didn't take a picture of the one I made a few days ago - I think this was made by Delia!

Summer pudding is one of the easiest of things to make though - it is a bit of a bitsa recipe - take bitsa this and bitsa that...

Get good quality white bread, thick sliced, or slice it thickly.

Use it to line a pudding basin - cut a circle for the base, and then fit slices around the side. Leave enough to cover it.

Now put a mixture of summer fruit, usually red and purple ones, together - I used raspberries, chopped strawberries and blueberries - black currants or redcurrants are also traditional. Warm these - I do it in the microwave for about a minute or two, until they start to get juicy.

Sweeten with sugar or sweetener to taste.

Put into the lined basin, cover with the remaining bread so that there are no gaps.

Put a saucer on the top, with something heavy on it (1kg bag of rice is good!).

Leave somewhere cool, like the fridge, until tomorrow, when the bread should all look a good red colour as the weight pushes the top bread onto the fruit and the juice out into the bread. Cheats tip - if there are still white patches add a small amount of fruit juice on top, replace your saucer and leave a bit longer!

Turn out onto a plate, add a bit more fruit if you want it to look posh!

A spoonful of cream, ice-cream or yoghurt is good.

I have to admit that I didn't take a picture of the one I made a few days ago - I think this was made by Delia!

Summer pudding is one of the easiest of things to make though - it is a bit of a bitsa recipe - take bitsa this and bitsa that...

Get good quality white bread, thick sliced, or slice it thickly.

Use it to line a pudding basin - cut a circle for the base, and then fit slices around the side. Leave enough to cover it.

Now put a mixture of summer fruit, usually red and purple ones, together - I used raspberries, chopped strawberries and blueberries - black currants or redcurrants are also traditional. Warm these - I do it in the microwave for about a minute or two, until they start to get juicy.

Sweeten with sugar or sweetener to taste.

Put into the lined basin, cover with the remaining bread so that there are no gaps.

Put a saucer on the top, with something heavy on it (1kg bag of rice is good!).

Leave somewhere cool, like the fridge, until tomorrow, when the bread should all look a good red colour as the weight pushes the top bread onto the fruit and the juice out into the bread. Cheats tip - if there are still white patches add a small amount of fruit juice on top, replace your saucer and leave a bit longer!

Turn out onto a plate, add a bit more fruit if you want it to look posh!

A spoonful of cream, ice-cream or yoghurt is good.

That's English English - I can't remember whether you are a Brit or in the US - if the latter, a pudding basin is basically a bowl the shape that pudding is!

I'm not sure - that seems to be an American term, and the only pictures I could find would have made a ring cake, as they had a central funnel, but if they don't all have the funnel it would be similar. Pudding basins look like this (http://www.lakeland.co.uk/product.aspx/!3493_3496_3497) - or the more traditional look (http://www.lakeland.co.uk/product.aspx/!10671).

Any deep round dish would work - so that it is a good shape when you turn it out.

But I won't have raspberries until NEXT year!

Julia, there were currants at the Farmer's Market Sunday, and I thought of Summer Pudding...

They all work - we did an autumn version once with blackberries and it worked well.

And it is fat free, and you can use sweetener if you are watching your sugar....

Oh thank you! That sounds easy enough for me to make it without the customary swear words...I'm looking forward to having this on Sunday now. Lovely! And I can count it as some of my five-a-day I suppose. And I bet yours was just as pretty to look at.

Definitely part of the five-a-day! And it really is that easy.

A layer of cling-film between the top and the saucer is useful too.

Thank you! :)

That's not a pudding, that's Suicide by Raspberries! Yum; raspberry is one of my favorite dessert fruits.

By the way, puddings in America are vastly different. Here's what "ours" look like: http://www.cookiemadness.net/puddingphoto.jpg
It's made of a substance like gelatin and it usually served cold. The most common types are chocolate (as in the photo), vanilla, tapioca (I think made from another kind of bean like vanilla), and rice (made with real rice in it) pudding.

Ah, so that's what a "summer pudding" looks like. Yum! Looks wonderful-- I'll have to try that!

And thanks so much for the birthday wishes!

Interesting-- I've never seen anything like that first one! I actually own something like the second, though I call it a mixing bowl! :D It would probably work just fine!

The first set were useful because of the lids. I have a couple of pudding basins which are both pyrex - really good for making this as you can check that the juice has got all the way through.

To us a mixing bowl usually means a bigger one, although we would use the small ones for mixing small amounts. So a small mixing bowl is probably exactly the same thing, and would work perfectly. It is just to make it the right shape to turn out easily.

And a standard saucer just fits into the top of a bowl this size to put even weight onto the bread and fruit mixture - it doesn't work if you don't put enough weight on.

My pleasure - I hope you had a lovely day.

In UK English 'pudding' is a blanket word - more traditional than 'Dessert' which is seen as a bit of a middle class affectation! In practice no one would use 'dessert' as part of the name of a dish, but there are many many things with 'pudding' in their name.

Americans use the word for a small subset of what we would class as puddings - we would call most of your 'puddings' blancmange. We would also refer to the tapioca and rice ones as milk puddings - but would always eat them hot - do you? Actually tapioca is usually called 'frogspawn'!

I heard someone on the radio last week explaining that Americans don't have any of the real classic British hot puddings at all - Eve's Pudding, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Jam Roly Poly, Lemon Pond Pudding and so on.

I felt very sorry for you all! But on the other hand you don't have anywhere near the amount of temptation when you eat out!

Summer pudding, I hasten to add, is actually a cold one.

It is really easy to make. We use that shape of bowl and then a saucer just fits into the top, with a weight on it, to push the juice out into the bread, and make it hold together properly for turning out.

I hope you had a lovely day - with cake!

In the US, there is no stigma about the word "dessert". In fact, it's what we normally call it.

All of our puddings are blancmange. We don't really have any other types. Just about all the blancmange is served cold; I rarely see it served hot. We don't have any interesting, cute names for our puddings. They're named by the main ingredient.

Just about the only "real" puddings we see in America are blood pudding and plum pudding--and that's only at the holidays when someone or some restaurant wants to be "ethnic".

Oh, we have plenty of temptation. But our dinner portions at restaurants are immense, and so being on a full stomach, you have no room to fit in dessert. You should try the American version of fudge. It's vastly different from what I've heard your fudge is made of. Ours is made with rich cocoa or peanut butter--too good to eat just one square!

I realised that I hadn't mentioned the whole set of savoury puddings - steak and kidney pudding is very traditional. blood pudding is called 'black pudding' in the UK, and eaten fried in slices with bacon, saisage etc.

Fudge here is very rich too - the main ingredients are sugar and butter, but then flavourings are added; vanilla, or chocolate (sometimes by adding cocoa, sometimes by adding actual chocolate to the mix), rum and raisin, cherry and walnut and so on. Our local shop does a very good peppermint.

Looking at pictures on Google, and recipes, I think it must be pretty similar on both sides of the Atlantic - I had to check each time to see whether the picture was a UK one or a US one - although I think yours always looks like the softest of the British stuff - so some of the British stuff is slightly more crumbly than yours.

Then there is 'Tablet' which is the Scottish version and is much more crumbly, a 'shorter' texture - you can break a piece of tablet in two, but fudge would just bend and stretch. Actually I like tablet even more!

Ooh, I don't think I could eat steak and kidney pie/pudding. I'm not really one for organ meat. No one my age (twentysomethings and younger) in America really eats organ meat--that's more for the "old farts" who like liver and onions.

Fudge is the same? All right then. I had heard from other Brits that your fudge isn't all that good. Guess they were wrong!

I would like to try tablet. It sounds good! What sort of flavors does it come in?

Tablet is usually vanilla, or just sugar flavoured(!) although I have seen recipes that include chocolate. I have just posted my tablet recipe as a new post, so that it is easier for me to refer back to anytime.

This icon is ironic when discussing tablet!

Birthday Greetings.

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