Series 3, Episode 6, Queen of Puddings

I’d never heard of queen of puddings before seeing this on the bake off so (once again) had no idea what this was supposed to taste like! I’ve had all 3 components before, but never in that combination. For the FIRST time during this bake off challenge (and first time ever for me), the recipe included making the actual jam, finally! Here’s the recipe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/queen_of_puddings_79904

I found it quite odd that this had breadcrumbs in the base. I couldn’t really tell whether my custard was any good because there were lumpy bits of bread in it. It also looked bubbly, is custard supposed to be bubbly? I decided it would probably be fine after it was baked anyway. Here’s the bubbly pre-baked photo:

It was difficult to tell how well the custard was set after baking but I thought it looked ok, here’s a post-baked photo:

Looks pretty custardy to me! So that was layer one done, next was the jam layer. I used frozen summer fruits for my pudding for convenience, maybe it the summer I’d have tried a bit harder. The recipe doesn’t say anything about temperatures or how long to leave it for or much else really so I just started cooking and hoped. It turned out to be pretty easy to spread over the custard, I guess the custard was set and the jam was the correct consistency. Here’s layer 2:

Does that look like an appetising jam layer to you? I’m going to go with yes, it’s definitely jammy and not straight from a horror movie or anything, it’s a delicious queen of puddings!

I really like making (and eating) meringue, I find it’s almost magical and so pretty, like a unicorn. Here’s how it looked with the final layer assembled and baked:

I don’t have very big piping nozzles so I had to make do with what I had. At the time I was really pleased with it, I don’t think this photo really does it justice but I had some friends I wanted to feed! You’ll have to just take my word that it looked good. It would have been nice to have a glass serving dish to see the layers from the side, but I made do with this cake tin!

I served it pretty much straight out of the oven so still very hot. I noticed as I was serving it that the custard looked a bit odd, it looked quite lumpy. I don’t know whether that was because the custard was wrong, the jam had curdled it or it was just lumps of breadcrumbs, so I don’t actually know what, if anything, went wrong. Here’s a delicious bowl full of pudding:

You can’t really see the lumpy custard here, but there is something watery looking there too, again, I’m not sure why this happened!

I enjoyed the flavour anyway, though it was very sweet. I was pleased with my first attempt at making jam and even had some leftover to make some jam tarts with. The meringue was light and chewy so I nailed that at least.

The feedback was generally that it tasted lovely and everyone left empty bowls so that’s a good sign. I’m not sure whether I’d make this again, I think I’d like to know what I’d done wrong though.

Thanks for reading.

Lily

https://www.instagram.com/lilylilysparks/