What We Ate Wednesday--Sticky Toffee Pudding

Hello lovelies! I hope you had a very happy holiday! We had a glorious feast of savoury nutroast, crispy roast potatoes, green peas, homemade orange cranberry sauce and lashings of gravy. Then we had roasted parsnips and carrots like bookends on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.

But what did we have for dessert? Sticky Toffee Pudding. Which is not a pudding at all, but a date cake with toffee sauce. Confused? In the UK, the term pudding can actually refer to any sort of dessert, not just the pudding sort. A bit like how every kind of fizzy drink in the American South is a coke. (as in Q:What kind of coke do you want? A:I'll take a sprite.)

There are plenty of high caloric versions out there with skyrocketing sugar and laden with animal fat and secretions, but this one is lower in sugar and fat and still taste *amazing.*

The original recipe comes from {HERE}. Oh She Glows is one of my favourite food blogs. I made it  a few years ago as it is described in the recipe in the link and it was a wee bit more trouble to make and used more dates than my regular date cake recipe. I decided this year to make my regular foolproof date cake recipe and then add the Toffee Sauce from Oh She Glows' recipe.

Now, this date cake recipe is lovely on its own. It comes up great gluten free--plenty moist and sticky. It makes a lovely snack cake or tea cake. But add the toffee sauce and whoa....you might just want to slap your mama.

{HERE} is a link to my date cake recipe. I have included step by step instructions with photos to show you how to make it. I mean, if you have the time and can afford extra dates then by all means use the one from the Oh She Glows website. But this cake only uses 18 dates, so was more economical to make. Her cake also had pecan in them. I only had about half a cup pecan left from other cooking adventures so i opted to sprinkle mine on the top for some crunch instead of baking them inside the cake.

So, make whichever date cake cake you want--OH SHE GLOWS version or MY DATE CAKE.
Then when the cake has about ten minutes left in the oven make the toffee sauce.

Notes on the toffee sauce: it is *delicious* and would be perfect for making and drizzling over just about anything like ice cream or just straight into your mouth. Seriously, I could have drunk it. It needs a THICK liquid to make it like a toffee. She suggests brown rice syrup which is what I used, but as i was squeezing it out of the bottle I thought to myself golden syrup might well have worked and would cost less than brown rice syrup. I think something like Karo syrup would work if you live in the US. Both golden syrup and Karo syrup would be less healthy than brown rice syrup, but you only use 1/3 cup syrup, so don't sweat it if you don't want to splash out of expensive syrup when you already have something suitable in your cupboard.

Oh She Glows Toffee Sauce

1/3 cup brown rice syrup (or other thick syrup like golden syrup or Karo)

 1/3 cup unpacked brown sugar (I used Demerara)

3 TB vegan butter

1 TB  vanilla extract

1 TB plant based milk

Hefty pinch of (smoked) sea salt

 1/2 cup broken pecans

Bring to a low simmer, whisking constantly until sugar is dissolved and the sauce is warm. Stir in pecans.

When cake comes out of the oven use a fork to poke as many holes as you can (I made about 100) and then pour the toffee sauce over the top making sure all the holes are covered.

The toffee syrup sinks down into the holes and makes the cake all sweet and sticky and delicious.

We had a (large) slice warm from the oven as breakfast on Christmas day and then a (large) slice room temperature for breakfast on Boxing Day before Spiderman went to work wrangling those butterflies at the Botanic Garden.

After all, breakfast *is* the most important meal of the day.

I love this cake because it is relatively low in fat and sugar compared to other versions I have seen. Plus no animal was harmed to make it, so you just feel good about having a large slice for breakfast as a treat.