chocolate pudding

Ok, Angus won an 'Oscar' for his version at Summer Gathering and Xavier got nominated for best beard after his adventures eating it... so here is the recipe I have - having already written it out for Dylan and been asked for it by Thomas I figured putting it here made most sense!

This is the version I got from Michael when I needed it in a hurry to take to Pardshaw at the Beck's behest. The original verison which Bee's mum got from the Guardian (and was made famous when we made it for about 150 people at YFCC in Newcastle one year - I seem to remember Laurence put it in YQ as Aunty Dunford's chocolate pudding, so if you still have back issues from circa 1990 you'll find it there!) is pretty much the same but uses cups instead of tablespoons, as more people tend to have spoons I'm sticking to his (which he got from his mum - cheers Michael's mum!), if you don't know what a tablespoon is it is about 4 teaspoons/20ml! Fortunately the recipe is fairly forgiving of guestimates of quantities so don't worry about it too much....

the mixture...
4 oz Self Raising flour
1 teaspn salt
2.5 oz caster sugar (2 oz is ok)
1 tablespn cocoa powder
2 tablespn oil (veg/corn/sunflower etc or melted butter)
8 tablespn milk (soya works!)
few drops vanilla essence

the topping...
2 oz brown sugar
1 tablespn cocoa powder
0.5 pint boiling water

Method
0) Pre heat oven to 350 f / Gas 4
1) Sift flour, salt, sugar & cocoa together
2) in another bowl mix oil, milk and vanilla essence
3) Stir (1) into (2)
4) Pour/spread mixture into a 2 pint oven dish

Now for the topping...
5) Mix the cocoa and sugar together and sprinkle over the pudding
6) Pour the boiling water over the whole thing abd bake for 45-60 minutes

In theory this serves 4-6... but from experience 3 can make short work of it all pretty fast! Apologies to those who use metric, I don't have my cookbooks here with conversion tables in so you'll have to work it out yourselves or Google for a handy link! I don't have any kitchen scales at all here so methinks a trip to the Warehouse is called for....