Why you are cooking this tonight
The sticky date pudding is the Australian pub dessert. It is deep brown, heavy with dates and treacle and brown sugar, and it comes out of the oven so dense you could brick a wall with it. Then you drown it in butterscotch sauce, drop a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, and discover why there is no plate of dessert in this country that sells as reliably on a Tuesday night.
The trick is bicarb soda and boiling water on the dates: it softens the fruit and makes the pudding rise like a dark cloud. The sauce is nothing but butter, brown sugar, cream, reduced to a caramel. If you can boil a kettle you can make this.
Serve in individual ramekins for a pub-style plate-up, or in one big dish for the family. Both work. Cold leftover pudding sliced and fried in butter is the best breakfast you will have all winter.
Notes on method
Use Medjool dates if you can find them. Chop them small. Don’t skimp on the boiling water. The sauce thickens as it cools, so take it off heat while it still looks slightly runny.
What to pour with it
Rutherglen muscat or an aged tawny. For a cocktail pairing, an Old Fashioned with bourbon echoes the caramel and dates.
Woodford Reserve Bourbon
Bourbon Old Fashioned. Caramel and dates fold into bourbon vanilla.
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Starward Two-Fold Whisky
Australian wine-cask whisky over ice. The fruit is already there.
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The recipe
Ingredients
Method
- Preheat oven to 170°C fan-forced. Grease 8 ramekins or a 22cm square tin.
- Place dates in a bowl with bicarb, pour over boiling water. Sit for 10 minutes.
- Cream butter and brown sugar until pale. Add eggs one at a time, then vanilla. Fold in flour.
- Add date mixture including its liquid. Stir to combine.
- Divide among ramekins (about three-quarters full). Bake 25-30 minutes until set and a skewer comes out clean. A big dish needs 40-45 min.
- Combine brown sugar, cream, butter and salt in a saucepan. Simmer 5 minutes, stirring, until slightly thickened. Stir in vanilla.
- Turn puddings out of ramekins. Pour hot sauce generously over each. Serve with vanilla ice cream.
Nutrition
Two things that go wrong
You used cooking dates instead of medjool.
Cheap pitted dates make a tough, sandy pudding. Medjool dates are softer, sweeter, and break down properly when soaked. Worth the extra spend.
Your sauce reduced to toffee.
Butterscotch sauce thickens dramatically as it cools. Take it off the heat while it still looks slightly thin and pourable — it’ll set to perfect glossy sauce by serving time. If you reduce too far, add cream to bring it back.
Variations worth knowing
- Sticky ginger puddingAdd a tablespoon of grated fresh ginger to the dates and 2 tsp ground ginger to the batter. Christmas-dinner energy.
- Chocolate sticky toffeeReplace 30g of the flour with cocoa powder. Pour warm chocolate sauce over instead of butterscotch.
- Individual jarsBake the puddings in 8 small jam jars instead of one tin. Posh single-serve presentation, perfect for dinner parties.
Leftovers and make ahead
The pudding keeps 4 days in the fridge and reheats brilliantly — wrap in foil and pop in a 150°C oven for 15 minutes, or microwave individual portions for 60 seconds. The sauce keeps 2 weeks in a jar and is fantastic on ice cream, pancakes, or stirred into porridge.