There is a lot of British food that I adore. Pies and pasties for one. A great roast dinner on Sundays. But nothing, absolutely nothing compares to my love of Summer Pudding. This is an English classic. So much so, I have a couple of different recipes of it planned for the Wrightfood book. As soon as fresh local summer berries are available, this gets made. Over and over again. And I never bore of it. I also have a small confession to make. I have even made it with frozen berries in the winter, and it wasn’t half bad. It wasn’t a patch on the summer version, which uses amazingly ripe fruit, but well, it did lift a rainy grey day or two in the winter!

I should say that I don’t do a lot of desserts. Not that I don’t like desserts (or pudding as we call it in England – all desserts are called puddings), far from it. I just don’t cook a lot of them. I like to focus, and to me desserts are something that you must do a lot of to get perfect. It is another job entirely. There are a few desserts I really like to make, and summer pudding is definitely one of them. Incidentally, if you want to check out a great desserts/baking blog take a look at a http://rhid-baked.blogspot.com. This is a new(ish) food blog run by a friend, and she makes incredible desserts. Right now she is studying at University, and does desserts in her spare time (or summer holidays). I am lucky enough that she brings them into our office through the week, and her husband that we work with gives us first dibs. Works for me! Anyhow, she is really bloody good at baking, and her blog is a great read of recipes.

The funny thing about summer pudding is that it is really hard to describe to someone, and make it sound as appetizing as it actually is. It is really just a bread bowl of fruit, whose juices have been allowed to soak into the bread. “doesn’t the bread go all mushy and horrible?” I hear a lot.. Well yes it can do, if you use the wrong bread. I think now is a good time to explain exactly what summer pudding is, and the best way to do that is to say how to make it.

This recipe is a modification of Dearie’s (my mum). I use a different combination of fruit, mainly because certain berries that are all over the UK are more rare here, and thus prohibitively expensive in some places. I have no idea how many summer puddings Dearie has made. It has to be hundreds and hundreds. She is the complete master of these things. So when she offers advice on how to make these puppies, I listen! She would always grow a lot of fruit at home, inside a “fruit cage”. A fruit cage is really just a big mesh cage that you can walk into, and it keeps the birds off your fruit. Very important! She would grow strawberries and raspberries, blueberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants. You name it, she grew it. Raspberries were always my favorite. I would always love picking the fresh fruit at the start of summer. I would run into the fruit cage with a big bowl, and just start picking. How many ended up in my mouth vs the bowl I have no idea.. I would guess at a 1:1 ratio! Our dog would always be running around with glee outside the cage, knowing all to well that we set aside the slightly bad looking ones for her. She loved raspberries. Come the end of summer I still loved all the fresh fruit, but started to really hate picking it!!

You need to get a variety of fresh (if you have withdrawls in the winter use frozen) berries. Avoid strawberries. They taste funny in the mixture, and tend to get really soft. I like to use at least three of the following: raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, redcurrants, blackcurrents. I have found that the last two can be pretty expensive up here in the Northwest. I tend to end up using raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. This one however swaps out the blackberries for redcurrants. Dearies original uses raspberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants. Try it if you can find the fruit at a good price.

I would get enough fruit to fill a large cereal bowl. The fruit type ratio is really up to you. I tend to lean on more raspberries than anything else, but that is just me.

So pop all the fruit in a saucepan with a little sugar, and turn up the heat. Keep an eye on it. You want the sugar to melt and the juices to flow from the fruit. You don’t want really soggy fruit though.

Next, grab yourself a bowl. Not just any bowl however, dimensions are important here. The bowl should be at least as high as it is wide. Why is this? Structural integrity. When we turn this out of the bowl, we want it to still be able to stand up. If it is wide and flat, it will most likely collapse on itself.

On to the bread. Get yourself the best quality sliced white loaf you can find. If you use cheap bread, it will go really soggy, and make the whole thing horrible. I use the Island Bakery brand for summer puddings. Seems like their sliced white loaf holds up well. So, cut the crust off most of the slices from the loaf. Get a really buttery cloth, and wipe round the inside of the bowl, making sure not to miss a spot. You want a good butter coating going on here. Next up, line the bowl with your bread slices. You want this to be a perfect cover of the inside of the bowl. No holes! cut pieces to size. Jam bits in. It doesn’t matter how pretty it looks here, it just has to be a single layer of bread completely covering the inside of the bowl. Next up, pour in the fruit and juices. Make sure you get quite a bit of juice in it. If you don’t add enough juice, it won’t soak into the bread properly, and you will end up with bare patches.

If you have any juice left over, save it. You can use it later when you serve to paint over the summer pudding, filling in bare areas.

Now make yourself a bread lid for the bowl, and push it on tightly. Trim it to the edge of the bowl. Put a saucer over the top of the bowl. Find a 5lb weight. Put this on top of the saucer. This will help compress everything together, and help the fruit juices soak so deliciously into the bread. I find a bag of flour, or if you have it a 5lb dumbell works great. Put this on a plate (juice will most likely leak out), and bung it in the fridge.

Now comes the worst bit of summer pudding. Waiting. I hate this. You have to leave this overnight. The juices need time to work their magic. Darn them. It just plain isn’t fair. I have honestly had a dream about summer pudding once. That is pretty sad to admit. Perhaps only sad however to those that haven’t tasted this fantastic dessert.

So on to the next day. Remove the weight and saucer from the bowl, and using a thin knife loosen the pudding from the bowl edge.Turn the bowl upside down onto another plate. Shake the bowl. Do a dance, whatever it takes to get the pudding out of the bowl. But carefully does it. No acrobatics. We don’t want to ruin it at this stage. I would however not be above licking this up off the floor. Some people line the bowl with clingfilm instead of butter, and this can make removal easier. I however don’t like too much plastics in contact with my food for too long (nasty plastic chemicals seeping into the food.. especially from clingfilm), so I just butter it, and do the summer pudding shake. Before eating, it does taste better if you let it get to room temperature. Torture.

Simple bit comes now. Slice it up, and eat. Eat it very very slowly. You want it to last for ever. Some people add cream. I like it rude (naked). If you finish before someone else, distract them and eat theirs. It’s OK to do that. Really. Unfortunately for Danika, she eats slower than me. She is learning to ignore the “oh quick look, Drake is crawling!!!” line, and just focusing on where my spoon is relative to her pudding. Darn it.