I've known about "plum pudding" or "Christmas pudding" forever, and I'm not entirely sure why -- I suppose it is mentioned in literature, and it's been in movies etc. And over the years I've managed to obtain it, it seems like you could buy it in a tin, kind of like date/nut bread. And we had it up at my wife's family's house, there was always some discussion about whether to have it with hard sauce or cumberland sauce. Perhaps this was because my wife's maternal ancestors included some Brits who came over to Vermont around 1870 so the traditions could have stayed alive.
What surprises me is that I know all of that but I had not really encountered Sticky Toffee Pudding until recently, I suppose within this past year. I saw it made on a TV cooking show and thought, yum, that looks delicious. And then last August we had a very fancy meal at the Peacock Inn in Princeton and I ordered it for dessert, and it really WAS delicious.
So when friends invited us to visit and invited Louise to bring desserts I went looking for a recipe, and we made it. It is much simpler than plum pudding -- it's not steamed, there is no suet, there is not much fruit -- only dates. And when it was done I thought of taking a picture but it looks more or less like gingerbread, brown and plain like a cake. It is a "pudding" only in the British sense of "dessert." If someone offers you a "pudding" in England and you say yes, they might hand you an orange.
Of course the thing that makes it delicious is the sauce, a rich toffee sauce with dark brown sugar, butter, and cream, plus the chopped dates which disappear into the cake and give it a rich wonderful texture. This was very popular at our friends' dinner -- and I served it with a 1980 Gould Campbell vintage Port.
If you want the recipe, just Google "Martha Stewart Sticky Toffee Pudding." There are other versions out there but hers uses dark brown sugar and several others don't. And that's the one we made.
http://www.marthastewart.com/964319/sti ... ffee-sauce
