Sticky toffee pudding with butterscotch sauce

My favourite thing to eat in the whole world is cake. Sponge cake, chocolate cake, raw cake mix… you name it, I’ll eat it! My favourite type of cake is sticky toffee pudding yet curiously, I had never attempted to make it until just before Christmas last year.

The best sticky toffee I have ever had was at Margot’s restaurant in Padstow (see yummy links) and the chef posted his recipe on his online blog shortly after my first visit there. Sadly, the quantities given were so huge (restaurant sized portions) and my laziness such that I couldn’t be bothered to calculate scaling it down, and I feared what would happen to my thighs if I did make it, and so it became the cake that never was. However, I found the recipe a few weeks ago tucked into my notebook and it inspired me to attempt a slightly different version which Bill Granger documents in his book Everyday.

It’s called sticky date cake. Don’t be put off by the inclusion of dates. Knowing that Nick would never eat it if I mentioned their presence, I made it and told him it was toffee cake and he was none the wiser! In fact, its even stickier and more fudgily glorious for their inclusion so please don’t leave them out.

Ingredients
Cake

• 300gms pitted and chopped dates (you can buy them in bags ready chopped to save any hassle)
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 250ml water
• 70gm unsalted butter
• 170gm caster sugar
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 185gm self raising flour

Butterscotch sauce

• 200ml double cream
• 150gm unsalted butter
• 185gm soft brown sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180degrees C/gas mark 4 and grease and flour an 8inch round or square metal baking tin
2. Put the dates into a saucepan with the water and cook slowly for 5-6 mins, stirring occasionally until all the water has been absorbed.
3. Remove from the heat and stir in the bicarb and the butter. Set aside to cool for 5 mins.
4. Transfer to a large mixing bowl or food processor. Add the eggs, vanilla and sugar and mix well. Fold in the flour until combined.
5. Pour the batter into the baking tin and bake for 50mins or until a knife comes out clean when poked into the middle of the cake.

6. Leave to cool on a baking rack but leave it in the tin.
7. Put all the ingredients for the butterscotch sauce into a small saucepan and stir over a medium heat until the butter and sugar have melted.
8. Turn up the heat, bring the mixture to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes. This will get very very hot so please be careful.
9. Poke some holes in the top of the cake with a knife, pour over half the sauce. If serving immediately go right ahead. Put the sauce in a jug on the table for people to pour over. If not, leave the cake and extra sauce to cool fully (keep the sauce in the fridge). Before serving warm the cake for 10 minutes in the oven at 150 degrees C and warm up the sauce for 15 seconds in the microwave or in a saucepan on the hob.