Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding: or, Who put a cake in the humidifier?

Winter is still here after three days! That doesn't always happen in post-climate change Texas. It's so cold that the sleet and snow are still on the ground 72 hours after landing. Midnight looks like twilight because of all the light bouncing back off the white ground. Cars are carefully creeping up streets that haven't seen salt, sand, or plows. 

Some of the people in the house are watching the ERCOT dashboard and national power outage maps the way many men stare at weather maps as soon as thunder claps outside. I've been getting thrice-hourly reports shouted across the house of which counties in what states have gone dark. My friends and relations have all been calling to "check up on" each other. I think it's partially to make sure everyone's doing all right and mostly to have some human contact while the roads are too iced to actually see anyone. 

A lot of my friends up north have said that we're soft for being rendered semi-helpless at 12° (Or -11° if you prefer celsius). But the cold here hits different. First, the state of Texas doesn't really believe in slowplows, or salting, or road sand. Instead, most of us are marooned until the road ice melts from the heat of the cars going over it. Second, houses here aren't really built for freezing weather. A lot of them aren't even insulated at all. This means the cold in Texas doesn't stay outside. It follows you into the house, cuts its way into your bedroom, and gets under the blankets with you. 

With that in mind, I made this as an excuse to steam the kitchen for two hours.

Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding ½ cup shortening 1¼ cup sugar 1 tsp nutmeg 1 teaspoon each vanilla and almond extract (the original recipe uses rum extract instead) 2 eggs 2 cups flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda 1½ tsp salt ⅔ cup milk 1½ cups (9.5 oz) raisins ½ cup chopped pecans ½ cup (2.6 oz) shredded coconut 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted (or 3 tablespoons cocoa powder) Grease a 2-quart pudding mold (or any pan or heat-safe bowl that you can completely fit inside a large pot), then cut a circle of paper to fit the bottom of it and press it into place. In a large bowl, beat shortening, sugar, and nutmeg until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating each in thoroughly. Then beat until light. Mix flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Add these alternately with milk to the sugar mixture. Stir in raisins, walnuts and coconut. Divide batter into two parts. To one-half of batter, add melted chocolate. Spoon light and dark batters alternately into well-greased 2-quart mold. Swirl batters lightly with a knife. Cover tightly with foil. If desired, tie a lifting-handle out of string around the mold. Place on a rack in large pot. If you don't have a rack, just improvise a way to lift the mold off the bottom of the pot. A lot of people put the mold on an upside-down ceramic plate in there. Or you can put some wads of aluminum foil for the pudding to sit on. Pour in boiling water to come halfway up mold, then put a lid on the pot. Simmer for two and a half hours. Lift out of the pot, remove the foil cover, and let rest for two minutes before turning out onto a plate. If desired, sprinkle with powdered sugar, sprinkled through a sieve to keep it from landing in clumps. Serve with your favorite sauce. Chocolate syrup would be good, and so is the sauce from when we made Golden Treasure Pudding. Store any leftovers in a tightly sealed container- they go stale quickly. Note: If halving the recipe, steam it for the full time instead of taking it out of the pot early. Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

I'm actually understating why I made today's recipe. I've been staring at it for a long time and wondering how it would come out if I ever made it. It comes from that all-dessert cookbook my great-grandmother found for me in a thrift store. The writers had me sold at the first sentence above the recipe: "An unusual dish that calls for an extra bit of care and proves well worth it—that's Raisin Swirl Steamed Pudding." Unusual, you say? "Well worth" the "extra bit of care," you say?

Favorite Recipe of America: Desserts, 1968

I miss the days when food photographers where made an elaborate still life instead of using shallow focus and sparse white backgrounds. Also, you just know they individually arranged the raisins poking out of that pie in the background.

Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts, 1968

Getting to the recipe, I initially thought I would let our pressure cooker shorten our steaming to a few short minutes. Just to confirm it would work before ruining dessert, I looked up pressure cooker puddings to see what other people have to say about them. (I knew that I absolutely was not the first to have this genius idea.) I found a lot of AI slop that said I should do it. (Or at least, I think it was AI. I'm not as good as I wish at spotting it. But I usually figure it's AI if it seems like the work of an unusually soulless ad copywriter.) Eventually, I found a real person asking our very question on Nigella Lawson's website. Nigella's staff (who are also real people and not AI bots) basically said it was technically possible but "we are unable to guarantee the results."

The baking powder was their main misgiving. They thought it might not raise the pudding under high pressure because all those little gas bubbles would get squeezed and compressed. At first I thought that it wouldn't matter. Then I remembered that high altitude causes recipe havoc, and it is tiny twitch on the barometer compared to a pressure cooker. I therefore decided to follow the directions instead of ignoring them. 

The pudding mold was a bit trickier because I don't have one. After dropping various heatproof bowls into pots to see what would fit in what pot, I settled on the insert from our rice cooker.  

Having resolved the cooking method, we had a LOT of things to stir into this pudding. I naturally traded the walnuts for pecans because walnuts are horribly bitter. (As I've said in earlier posts, I've heard walnuts are good right off the tree, but no one near me has one in their yard.)

As we got to the main bowl, I couldn't figure out why we were steaming this instead of baking it. It looked like a cake batter. (Because I sometimes love a good kitchen project, I also contemplated whether I should put this in a pudding bag if it went right the first time.) This recipe doesn't make a lot of cake batter compared to all the incoming fruit and nuts. Is this supposed to be some sort of heavily-loaded fruitcake?

The fruit and nuts volumized our batter a lot.

I used cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate because we had it on hand. It noticeably stiffened the batter. You can see the white batter slumping in the pan while the chocolate batter stays very upright.

Here it is, all swirled up and ready to steam!

The original recipe only says to "cover tightly" before steaming without further detail, but I happen to have watched enough British cooking videos about Christmas puddings. Therefore, I know that you simply must make a pleat on top so your pudding has room to expand. I don't think it mattered given how little pudding we had in the basin. But if our raisin swirl came out flat, I could blame the recipe and not my unpleated ignorance.

Our cooker made an interesting racket as the pudding boiled. (We did end up using the pressure cooker because it's the biggest pot in the house, but I didn't pressurize it.)

And here it is, a perfectly risen cake! Given how perfectly flat it is on top, maybe we should steam all of our cakes. It would make stacking multiple layers a lot easier.

Our pudding failed upon unmolding. Half of it fell out nicely, and the other half stuck to the pan. But that isn't ruination, it's just your first guideline when cutting slices.

I love that you can see the two-toned batter splotches just like in the cookbook photo. It means that our pudding came out just like it did for the food stylists (or it at least came close). It would have been cute if it hadn't ripped in half. 

 

This tasted like a marble cake. For some reason, you would have almost thought I added some coffee to it. Our pudding had an interesting texture: light, fluffy, and somehow dense at the same time. It reminded me of the Bangor brownies which were halfway between cake and fudge. I didn't like the nuts, though. They got just softened enough to be... off.

The recipe says to serve with "your favorite sauce." I tried a small sample and didn't think it needed any help, but I poured a little bit of the sauce from our Golden Treasure Pudding on top anyway. The golden sauce made the pudding more photogenic, but it neither helped nor hindered the taste. But as promised in the recipe headnote, this was absolutely wonderful on a cold night.

As a final note, this got stale very quickly on an open plate. So you'll want to either quickly put the leftovers in a sealed container or just dunk the stale pudding in tea or hot cocoa.