Baked Sweet Potato Pudding

Old Friends – the nostalgia that overcomes me when I meet or hear from old friends.  Friends I might know through school or college or work or just come across some place.  But meeting them after years always brings about a sense of as if I found something I had lost – the times spent together, the things we did together, the chats we had – just everything takes me back in time.  Social Network sites have been quite instrumental in helping me connect to old friends.  With some friends it is so easy to continue from where we left off.  With others it is still difficult – they changed, I changed, times changed.  But nonetheless, it is always nice to meet friends. 

A couple of years back I came across a dear friend I knew from childhood.  We used to play a lot together during the summers and were good buddies.  Then suddenly we all went different ways and I lost track of where he was or what he was doing.  Of course on my part I did not make any effort to keep in touch and as time went by, it was more difficult to reignite a friendship that was dead for so many years.  Finally we were able to track each other again and now keep in touch.  The first time we chatted, we spent a good hour getting updated on our personal and work life.  Now I make it a point to chat or write to him at least once every couple of months.  I do not want to lose a friend again.  Life is too short to lose friends.  Not too short though to make new friends.  So in honour of all my old friends and all those new friends I am going to make in the span of my life…here’s to you…baked sweet potato pudding – my favourite.

Preparation Time: 75 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

3 cups cooked, mashed sweet potatoes

1 ½ cups sugar

¾ cup melted butter

9 eggs

1 ½ cups orange juice

3 tablespoons rum (optional)

2 tablespoons raisins

1 tablespoon nuts, chopped

2 teaspoons grated lemon rind

½ teaspoon cinnamon powder

Method:

1. Separate the egg yolk and whites.  Keep 6 egg whites separately as they would be used later in the pudding.  
2.  Put the mashed sweet potato, butter, sugar, egg yolks, orange juice, raisins, rum, nuts, cinnamon and lemon rind in a large bowl.  Mix and beat well together.   
3. Whip 3 egg whites till stiff and fold into the mixture.  
4. Grease a baking tin and pour the mixture.  Bake at 180 degrees C for 1 hour.  Allow the pudding to cool.  
5. Beat the remaining egg whites till stiff and pour over the pudding and bake for another 15 minutes. 

Chocolate Walnut Pudding

With the New Year just gone by, the one thing you hear everywhere, and these days see it on the statuses of several of your "on line friends" is about their new year resolutions.  And of course if you have record of their previous years resolution, you will see it is almost the same.  Which goes to show us that the old resolution failed and this is the 2nd, 3rd or in some instances even the 4th attempt at making it successful. But does this qualify us to be failures or just very resilient?  

I am guessing the top New Year resolutions of all time would have something to do with loosing weight (at least that is what I choose every year...and still am resilient about it to choose it yet again), maybe for many quitting smoking and for many others spending more time with the family. Personally, I have stopped making resolutions publicly.  The one secret resolution I always have and never accomplish is to loose weight - but then, when you love to cook, you are bound to eat what you make and hence very difficult to accomplish this resolution.  Perhaps I should resolve to exercise everyday - and then automatically I would have the resolution of loosing weight too accomplished...that seems better.  But on second thoughts, maybe resolve to exercise every other day seems more realistic.  And definitely the below recipe is no help in getting anywhere close to getting my weight down - chocolate puddings being my weak point after all. 

Mixed flours

Preparation Time: 1 hour

Serves 6

Ingredients:

 1 cup sifted flour

2 tablespoon cocoa powder

2 teaspoon baking powder

¾ cup granulated sugar

½ teaspoon  salt

½ cup semi skimmed milk

Roasted Walnuts

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 cup broken walnuts

¾ cup brown sugar

¼ cup cocoa powder

1 cup hot water

Method:

1. Sift together flour, baking powder, granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa and salt.  
2. Add milk, butter and vanilla essence to the mixture above.  
3. Roast the nuts till brown in colour.  Mix them into the above mixture.  
4. Pour into greased cake pan.  
5. Mix the brown sugar and the ¼ cup cocoa.  
6. Sprinkle over the batter in the pan.  
7. Pour hot water over the entire batter evenly.  
8. Bake in a pre heated oven (180 degrees C) for 45 minutes.

Hot water on the pudding

Sprinkled cocoa & sugar