Chocolate Orange Steamed Pudding

This is the dish that we will take to the next cookbook club meeting, and we decided to give it a test drive with a half batch. 13 Daughter selected this recipe because steaming a pudding seemed challenging.

Have you ever made a steamed pudding? The general idea is that a cake of sorts is prepared, poured into a mold or a bowl, covered, and boiled on the stove top. For this steamed pudding, we used a pyrex bowl, covered it with a piece of buttered parchment, and then a layer of aluminum foil, all secured with a piece of twine. Select a large enough pot to boil it so you can watch the water level.

But don't let me skip ahead. First, you make a chocolate sauce in the bowl for the cake. As it cools, you rotate the bowl so the chocolate is spread over the entire inside. We were only somewhat successful (at the end it cooled with half the chocolate at the bottom). The cake itself was a breeze - simple ingredients - but we substituted a blood orange for the orange, and a whole medium orange for a single large orange.

We cut the cooking time by about 10 minutes (given that it was a half batch). It came out of the bowl perfectly, and smelled heavenly. It was very moist, and the layer of chocolate sauce made a lovely sweet exterior. The cake itself was not very sweet - the recommended whipped cream would be the perfect addition.