It’s winter; it’s christ-on-a-bike cold; it’s been raining a lot. all I wanna do is curl up with some Freud essays or Angel episodes and some lemon delicious pudding.

Lemon delicious pudding. Kind of like those supermarket self-saucing puddings, except home-made and much, much more delicious. This is a Margeret Fulton recipe from the Encyclopedia of Food and Cookery, which I’ve had since I left home. Margaret promises, ‘When the pudding is cooked you will have a delicate cake on top and tangy lemon sauce underneath. Serve hot, with cream or custard.’

It works, too. You end up with this weird slightly stiff batter that looks like it won’t do anything, and after it bakes, you have the cake bit, and the sauce. Very, very nifty. A good fast way to make it is to whip the egg-whites in the food processor first with a bit of the sugar and put them in a mixing-bowl, then rinse out the food processor and do the butter, sugar, flour etc. Then you can really fold the batter together properly in the bowl, thus preserving the fluffiness of the egg-whites.

Recipe

45 g butter
3/4 cups caster sugar
2 tsp finely grated lemon rind (you can put more in if you’re partial to lemon, I think I just chucked in 2 tbs or more)
3-4 eggs, separated
3 tbsp plain flour
1 cup milk
1/4 cup lemon juice (again, add more if you like, and take out some milk so the liquid proportions are right)
pinch salt

Cream the butter with sugar until light and fluffy. Add lemon rind and egg yolks and beat well. Sprinkle sifted flour on top and stir in with milk and lemon juice. Beat eggwhites in with salt and a bit of the sugar until stiff peaks form and fold lightly into pudding mixture. Spoon into a greased 6-cup ovenproof dish and place in a roasting tin containing enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the dish. Bake in a pre-heated moderately hot oven (160C, 325F) for 1 hour until cake topping is cooked when tested with a fine skewer. (A fine skewer, because if you test it with a knife, it will probably deflate like a souffle.)

Serves 6, but keeps well overnight and heats up nicely the next day if you only have 2.