Super easy self-saucing chocolate pudding
A first for this blog: an actual recipe1! Click here to skip the waffle (mmm, waffles 🧇) and go straight to the self-saucing chocolate pudding recipe.
Today started early – not early early, but earlier than I would have liked – when mum knocked on my bedroom door to say she had received an offer of a lift to church tomorrow and what should she do? As my brain was still at least half in a world where I was a snake owner (that’s not some sort of weird euphemism: I had a literal snake, called Selene and a pretty coral colour that I’m pretty sure real snakes don’t come in), my initial response might have been less coherent than I would have liked. (Her eventual decision was that she’s not going as tomorrow’s speaker tends to go on a bit and she’s worried she’ll be stuck and unable to get home if she doesn’t feel well or has had enough.)
The rest of the day was spent trying to convince myself I wasn’t in pain, as yesterday I received the letter confirming my referral to the Pain Clinic and looked over the criteria for acceptance – and I don’t meet them. So what now, I really don’t know, but at least I can make a mean chocolate pudding, according to me and mum.
And you can too, with this recipe. It takes inspiration from lots of other recipes online, but with my own twist – it’s all made in one bowl (ish – you need one to melt the butter, but otherwise it’s all in one).
Self-saucing chocolate pudding
Serves 3 to 6 people, depending on appetite / greed.
Ingredients
- 130g self-raising flour
- 25g unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 100g soft brown sugar
- [If you’re using unsalted butter, you will also need a pinch of salt]
- 60g melted butter
- 1 medium egg
- Milk (see recipe for rough quantity, but you won’t need much)
For the sauce:
- 25g unsweetened cocoa powder
- 100g soft brown sugar
- Boiling water (enough to turn the above into a pourable liquid)
Method
Preheat the oven to gas mark 5 / 375° Fahrenheit / 190° Celsius.
Take an oven-proof baking dish, and weigh the dry ingredients – flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and sugar (plus the salt, if you’re using unsalted butter) – directly into it (the tare button is your friend here). Stir together until thoroughly combined.
Melt the butter in a small bowl in the microwave (or in a small saucepan on the hob if you prefer – in either case, it needs to be only just melted, and not hot enough to scramble the egg), crack in the egg, and stir them together.
Pour the egg and butter into the dry ingredients and stir in, with enough milk to make a thick-ish cake batter with no dry mix left. (If you overdo the milk and it becomes too liquid, you can add a bit more flour to thicken it up again without ruining it. Yes, I tried it – just for recipe testing purposes, obviously, and not because my shaky hands messed up.)
Mix the sauce ingredients together then pour it all over the cake batter. (A tip I got online was to pour the liquid over the back of a spoon so it doesn’t make holes in the batter.)
Put the baking dish in the oven and cook until risen and cracked on top, with the sauce bubbling up from underneath. (But wasn’t it on top before? How did it get underneath? It’s magic! 🪄) It took about 40 minutes in our oven, but it tends to run cool so ymmv2.
Serve with cream, or ice cream, or on its own. It’s a damn fine pudding.
[Post-script, for anyone interested: I wrote this while watching the final of the 2025 Masked Singer, and I got 1 out of 3 right. Not that it matters to anyone except me and mum, and she will have forgotten by tomorrow. Oh well.]
Is it pineapple sponge today? 