Rice pudding

Couldn't be simpler really. 1 pint full fat milk, 2oz pudding rice, 2oz sugar. Cook in a casserole dish for 2 - 3 hours at Gas 2 or 3, 140 or 150C. You could add a knob of butter and a grating of nutmeg on top if you like.

Dad used to eat the skin, which was just fine because it used to make me gag. I only discovered the joys of pudding skin many years later.

So how did I get it so wrong last year? I put the pudding in to cook as per instructions above. I woke with a start at about 11pm, some 6 hours after I put the pudding in the oven. OMG! Nothing for it but to scrape the burn offering out in the morning, after it had cooled down.

But hang on. I looked inside the crockpot to find yes, some of it had burnt round the outside, but in the middle it was fairly solid and a deep golden yellow colour. Maybe it was salvageable?

What I'd made, inadvertently, was a caramelised condensed milk rice pudding, with all the yummy flavour of caramel from the burnt sugar, and of condensed milk as what had not been absorbed by the rice had been boiled away. I spooned what wasn't too burnt out, and poured a little top of the milk over it, and we had it for supper. "You must burn the pudding more often" said Hubby.

So don't assume that because something looks ruined that it necessarily is. Often something can be salvaged from it. Like the cake I made without any eggs. I cut it up and used it as the base for a trifle. Sometimes you can make something from the most unpromising disaster with a little ingenuity.

Trifle

I guess most people's idea of a trifle is sponge cake, fruit, custard, cream and decorations, and if I'm honest Mom's trifles fit that bill. But we're talking about the 1960s here! So in honour of Mom's trifle I wrote a poem. I'm going to try and do it in a monospaced font to see if it looks like it should:

|Hundreds and thousands|
|Tinned condensed cream|
\Birds homemade custard/
 \Tinned fruit & jelly/
  \Sponge cake in rum/
   |YUM YUM YUM YUM!|

To start with, Mom would go to Firkins the bakers on her way home from work (or late in the day if she wasn't working) and get yesterday's sponge cake which was sold off cheap. (A good tip. I wonder if Greggs do something similar?) Then she'd split the cakes horizontally and pour dark rum, sherry, apricot brandy or whatever was left over from Christmas (but NEVER Dad's Drambuie!) over them. She would make up a jelly using jelly cubes, hot water and the juice from a tin of fruit. When it was partly set she'd stir the fruit into the jelly and pour it on top of the sponge cake. The custard was always Bird's custard - making this quantity of custard from scratch would involve 6 eggs which could be better used elsewhere. No matter: Bird's custard is the best. When it was colder than the jelly, that went on top. The whole thing then went into the fridge. 

Whipped cream, eh? Not on your nelly. A tin of Ideal condensed cream, shaken for hours to within an inch of its life, then opened and spooned on top. It has a taste all of its own. That was covered with "hundreds and thousands", those little coloured strands of sugar. Sometimes we could afford silver dragees,or sugared almonds, but not often. A real treat was glace cherries, which would be chopped into pieces rather than left whole.

And so back into the fridge, to be served at celebrations or if friends of Dad's came round for tea. (I'm not sure Mom was allowed friends round. I wasn't.) 

At some time in the 1960s, Birds themselves decided to produce boxes of trifle ingredients, which we tried but still went back to the original. If you want to you can try it for yourself. I don't make trifle now, I'm the only one in the house that eats it, and I'm fat enough thank you! But if I ever get the chance, this is what I shall make.