Chocolate Pear Pudding with Hot Chocolate Sauce

Choco-holics pay attention. This is a recipe for you. There are a lot of desserts in this book and I cannot possibly eat them all myself. Firstly I'm not really that much of a dessert person. I am a pastry and salty person. Desserts just aren't my bag baby...that is unless they're pastry. So I'd volunteered to bring a dessert to a Sunday dinner at my inlaws house. This way I win points with the inlaws while knocking off a recipe at the same time. It's win-win really.

This afternoon I started on the recipes. The Pudding calls for a 22cm square pan. I measured the square pan I have. It was slightly bigger but I figured it would work - so it might be a bit thinner, no biggie. Well it turned out to be a biggie after all. I buttered my pan, laid down the pears. Set about mixing the batter and then went to spread it over the pears as per Nigella's instructions...only I didn't get very far doing this. I'd spread the batter as thin as I could and I had about 2/3's of the pears covered. Fuck. I know, it's a strong word - but what was I to do? I had to be at the inlaws in about 90 minutes and my recipe was in a downward spiral. So I think to myself..I guess I'll just make another batch of the batter...about a half portion should do it...but do I have enough butter???????

I hadn't bought a new pound of butter for this because I'd weighed what I had left the day before and I'd had well over the 150g required for the recipe...but not necessarily enough for a second batch...but all I needed was enough for a half batch. I went to the fridge holding my breath and when I looked at the butter my heart sank. There wasn't much there at all. I was certain I was screwed but I weighed it anyhow. And can you believe my luck - I had exactly 75g worth of butter. I mean EXACTLY. I let a massive exhale of breath, nearly said a Hail Mary - but I'm not Catholic, and started on batch #2.

Now batch #2 was a last minute effort to save this recipe from disaster and as such my butter was not a room temperature. But I didn't let that stop me. I was on a time limit and my mixer would just have to break that butter down for me...which it did nicely..until I got to the spreading part again. Because batch #1 had been made correctly with room temp. ingredients it was super spreadable. But with batch #2's cold butter it was very stiff to spread. This was not a good combination. It took me forever to get this so that there were no exposed pears. Just getting the spreading done was an accomplishment all it's own. But once I did I popped it in the oven and set to start the chocolate sauce.

The sauce went much smoother, thank goodness. I'd decided to make a double batch because one thing you don't want to be skimpy on is chocolate sauce. The sauce calls for 'double cream' which I decided was just a thick cream and bought 18%. However, doing some internet reading later I discovered that double cream is actually something like 50% cream - supposedly not even available in North America. But the 18% worked just fine and really isn't 18% enough of a fat content??? I mean really even that is pushing it.

Anyhow, the sauce came together great and in 30 min the pudding was ready to come out of the oven. I had enough time to rest for about 15 min, straighten my hair and we were off to the inlaws.

I got 9 portions from this recipe and all but one person liked it. The one tough critic who disapproved said a firm "yuck". Only to be corrected by his mother to rather say "No thank-you" and headed off to watch The Wiggles with a couple of cookies. But when you're 3 you're not always easy to please.

One thing I will say about this, is it's incredibly rich. It's like a brownie with pears smothered in chocolate sauce. For me this is not my dream dessert. But I fall firmly outside the realm of chocolohism. But if you do love yourself a nice chocolatey rich dessert this is your ticket to paradise.

***Note: this would be best served straight out of the oven.