Perhaps a tad too soon...

...but here is a delicious recipe in celebration of bananas being almost cheap enough to buy again. It was inspired from my copy of 'The 21st birthday Cookery Book of the Country Women's Association in Tasmania'. Most of the recipes for meals hold pretty much no interest for me (laden with various animal parts and by-products) but the desserts and confections can mostly be made suitable for us!

Baked Banana Pudding
Serves 4-6

Ingredients

115g margarine (I use nuttlex lite)
2 med-large bananas
2 tbsp chia seeds
1/2 cup cold water
zest and juice of one lemon
1 cup raw caster sugar (or regular sugar)
1 cup of wholemeal self raising flour


Make sure you use McAlpin's!

Method

Pre heat oven to 180 degrees Celcius.

Mix chia seeds into water and set aside to thicken. Mash bananas in a small bowl and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream together the margarine and sugar. Add lemon juice and zest and beat to combine. Beat in chia seed goo and bananas until well combined. Sift in flour (don't forget to re add in the bran) and beat again until combined. You may need to add a little bit of milk...the batter should be thick but not dry at all.

Pour batter into a greased or lined baking tin (I used a small brownie pan). Bake for about 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.

After baking

Serve with ice cream!
------

I served ours with half arsed frozen vanilla hazelnut iced milk cream mixture. Haha it was ok.

The pudding however was delicous! I'm kind of surprised it worked, but there isn't any reason it wouldn't have is there. It's soft and moist without being gooey and gross, it's not TOO sweet, though maybe next time I'll experiment with less sugar. It leaves room for any add ins - nuts, raisins, chocolate...And it''s really simple with few ingredients! If you don't want to see your chia seeds, try using a flax egg replacement for two eggs or you can buy white chia seeds. I don't care...they aren't noticeably crunchy in this either. If you don't like a lemony flavour, omit it and use vanilla essense. You'll probably need the milk at the end if you do that though.

I've bookmarked many many recipes in my book and I'm pretty excited about a few of them :)

My take/attempt on a steamed pudding

After reading my post where I mentioned the CWA of Tasmania's 21st birthday cookbook, my dad surprised me by buying me a copy of my own! Plus another one 'The Country Women's Association Cook Book - seventy years in the kitchen' which is the newer (newest? Published in 2009) by the NSW branch. Needless to say I was pretty excited. I could now bone and truss and de feather a fowl if I needed to. (Seriously. Everything is in here.)

So what to make? Steamed pudding sounded good - and there's almost a whole chapter dedicated to them. Some specifically without eggs, and when I actually read through them most of them didn't have eggs anyway, so I chose the Treacle Steamed Pudding to have a go at. I've added/substituted things so I'm going to post my version up here.

Ginger Molasses vegan Steamed Pudding

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 cup wholemeal plain flour (white is ok)

1 tsp bicarb soda

1 tsp salt

1 heaping tsp ground ginger

2 tbsp raw sugar (white ok - any granulated kind)

2 tbsp vegan margarine

1 tbsp blackstrap molasses

1 cup non dairy milk of choice (I used homemade soy)

1/2 cup currants

First, sift your flour, bicarb, salt and ginger into a mixing bowl. Don't forget to add back in the germ/bran if using wholemeal! Stir in the sugar and rub in the margarine until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Add the molasses and stir until well combined. Pour in non dairy milk and stir gently, then fold in the currants.

Pour into a pudding basin with lid, or use a bowl and cover it with greaseproof paper tied with string like I did (which is where the trouble began!*)

Find a saucepan that fits your bowl and put it in. Fill with water til about halfway up the covered bowl, put the saucepan lid on and bring to the boil. Steam/boil for two hours.

When ready (I stuck a skewer in and it came out semi-clean) turn out onto a plate and serve with custard or ice cream!

*Onto the trouble! I stupidly forgot to keep an eye on the boiling water level in the saucepan and of course it boiled dry. I decided to boil the kettle and re fill it. Yeah don't do that - I heard a CRACK and thought oh no it's smashed! My bowl is about as big as the saucepan so I couldn't see - I just ran a spoon around the outside of the bowl and encountered no cracks (apparently) so I left it.

When it was ready I took off the paper and saw this lovely great big hole! Luckily it was a nice clean break and there was no glass in my pudding. I did burn it though. Observe:

I wouldn't call it a 'failure' as such, since it was still edible, but it's a warning for next time!

Is a glass bowl on a gas stove a bad idea? Would it even make a difference if the stove was electric? Do pudding basins even exist anymore? What about silicon? Any suggestions? Hahaha.

All the bowl smashing and burning aside, it's pretty damn good if I do say so myself. Which I do.