Eve's Pudding - a not-very-random recipe

The current Random Recipes Challenge at Belleau Kitchen is Puddings, Cakes and Bakes. Now being diabetic, I don't generally eat puddings  and cakes, so it was going to have to be either a savoury bake or a specialist diabetic recipe. I decided to square up to the challenge and attempt the latter.

The snag is, I only possess three recipe books for diabetics, because after being diagnosed I soon realised that as long as I kept to a low fat, high fibre diet  and mostly avoided refined sugar, my blood sugar levels were well controlled.

So I picked one of the three books at random. And there wasn't a single baking recipe in it!

I tossed a coin between the other two. The book that won had just ONE baking recipe in it - carrot cake, which we both detest.

So I ended up with a not-so-random selection of just ONE book, one I hadn't really looked at closely before. "Diabetes" by Azmina Govindji and Jill Myers.

This book has a whole chapter of cakes, bakes and desserts, adapted to suit the diabetic diet by  reducing sugar, using low fat spread where possible and wholemeal flour for fibre.

The Eve's Pudding recipe has no sugar added to the Bramley apples. Instead, they are mixed with the rind and juice of a lemon and an orange, and chopped hazelnuts are added. Except that I appear to have run out of hazelnuts (must be something to do with the vat of muesli I made last week) so I added toasted flaked almonds.

The topping is almost a normal 2-egg creamed sponge, with 100g of wholemeal self raising flour plus a tiny bit of baking powder and cinnamon, 100g low fat spread, 2 eggs and only 50g of sugar. Being used to my granny's aide-memoire "The weight of the eggs in sugar, fat and flour" I really didn't think that would work, and it certainly looked like a stingy amount of topping before it went into the oven.

 

But to my surprise, it rose beautifully and behaved just as an Eve's Pudding should. With the reduced fat and sugar,  plus wholemeal flour (my last attempt with wholemeal self raising flour was about 30 years ago, when it gave me a very "this must be good for you, it's so horrible" result - maybe they've improved it since then) I have to say it exceeded my expectations.

 

Surprisingly enough,  the apple mixture didn't turn out to be too sharp and the topping was very light and tasty. I really don't miss desserts now, but I'd certainly make this again or try one of the other recipes  from the book if  a dessert or cake eating occasion arose. In fact I've already stuck Post-Its in the Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding pages!