Raspberry Bakewell Pudding

This recipe is from The Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain which I have to say is a very interesting, if quite unusual, book. Si King and Dave Myers travelled the length and breadth of Britain to find the best food in each county. What they found was a mixture of recipes from professional kitchens, and stuff you could more easily and affordably make at home. For example, the section on the county of Lincolnshire offers a plum bread, and on the following page, a haslet beignet, with rhubarb puree and sage foam. My favourite instruction in the book comes courtesy of a Slow-cooked Derbyshire Lamb with oatcake crust and wild garlic and rosemary jus: "To make the caramelised onion mousse: Dissolve the methocel in the chicken stock and fold it into the onion puree. Season with salt and pepper and pipe into individual moulds. Cook in a water bath at 70 degrees centigrade for 10 minutes". I wonder that they offered instructions at all. I feel rather like a child gawping into a sweet shop window.

Anyway, my favourite recipe from the book hails from Derbyshire, and is a raspberry bakewell pudding. Cast your mind away from the spongey, cloying offerings of a certain mini-cake manufacturer and toward an unctuous wobbly pudding! This, quite obviously, uses raspberries but you could use cherries if you wanted to. It has a puff pastry base as opposed to shortcrust, and it is devastatingly simple:

Ingredients:
1 packet of puff pastry
Some good dollops of seedless raspberry jam
A small box of fresh raspberries
100g unsalted butter
100g caster sugar
5 eggs
150g ground almonds
A few drops of vanilla essence

Method:
1) Preheat the oven to 190 degrees centigrade. Roll out the pastry until it is large enough to drape over a flan tin with a diameter of 25 cm. Push the pastry down into the flan tin so you can fill it. You should have some pastry overhang but leave it there for the time being.
2) Take a few spoonfuls of raspberry jam and spread it onto the pastry base. Just use your judgement as to how much you'd like, but I use about 5 tablespoons worth.
3) Crush your raspberries slightly and spread them over the jam in one even layer.
4) In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. I just whisked them by hand but use electronics at this point if you wish.
5) Begin to alternate adding the eggs and the ground almonds, so add one egg and a spoonful of almonds, then mix. Repeat until all the eggs and almonds are combined into the mixture.
6) Add your almond essence, then pour the mixture into the flan tin. Trim the edges of the pastry either now or when the pudding comes out of the oven.
7) Bake in the oven for 35-45 minutes, but check it every now and then. It should be lightly brown on the top.

I sliced the pudding and had it with fresh single cream and raspberries. As you can see I had trouble cutting the pudding neatly. It was extremely moist and frankly I wanted to eat it as quickly as possible! The smell of the pudding as it cooked was wonderful.

The Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain is available from amazon.co.uk: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hairy-Bikers-Food-Tour-Britain/dp/0297859749