Chômeur Pudding

This weekend, lots of food we did make. So prepare yourself for some hardcore blogging this week. Oh yes.

Right before leaving work on Thursday, I was roaming through the vegancooking forums, and I noticed this (supposedly grandiose mishap of a) recipe. Despite the drama surrounding the entry, it looked delightful, and I immediately knew I wanted to try whipping it up this weekend. I originally was just going to make it for myself and E, but when I realized I had some time to kill before my mom and sister stopped by for dinner Thursday night, I figured, What the hell--I'll just mix all the individual ingredients together and when we get back from dinner, it'll just take me five minutes to combine everything and toss it in the oven.

And only five minutes did it end up taking. This recipe is ridiculously quick and simple for as fancy-looking and tasty as it is. It's definitely one of those recipes that would be perfect for the holidays--it makes a good amount and takes (seriously) no time to make. The end result kind of resembles a bread pudding of sorts. It is UBER-sweet though, so prepare yourselves (and that's coming from someone with a seriously high sweetness-threshhold).

And it's a french-recipe, so unless you have lots of french relatives, you can butcher its pronunciation and get away with it, and then you can walk around your holiday gather asking people, Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? You'll sound brilliant and worldly, and hopefully no one will catch on to the fact that you're asking them if they want to sleep with you.



INGREDIENTS:

The cakey part

• 2 c. flour


• 3/4 c. sugar


• 1 c. soymilk


• 4 T. melted vegetable shortening or non-hydrogenated vegan margarine (I used the latter of the two)


• 1/2 t. salt


• 4 t. baking powder

For the syrup:

• 2 c. brown sugar or Sucanat (I used brown sugar)


• 2 c. water


• 1 t. flour

DIRECTIONS

For the syrup:
Mix dry ingredients first in a large glass baking dish and then mix in the water.

For the cake:
Mix dry ingredients first in a mixing bowl. Then, add the soymilk and melted vegetable shortening, mixing gently. Divide the dough into even 6 portions and put them in the syrup already prepared in a large glass baking dish (I used a large casserole). Bake uncovered at 375 F for 40 minutes (though you should probably stop and check on it after 30--it'll be a rich gold-brown and probably burpy when it's about done).

(The nice thing is, you can prep your ingredients in three batches (the syrup ingredients, the dry ingredients, the wet ingredients) and put them aside until your guests get over. Then you can just step out for no more than five minutes, work together the dough, and toss it in the casserole dish--40 minutes later, you have a warm dessert straight out of the oven, and your guests will be amazed.)

(Original recipe HERE)