Tuscan pudding.

For my birthday last year, my wonderful wife offered to cook me any recipes I chose for dinner. I picked Tuscan pudding out of one of our recipe books, she cooked it as promised, and we've been eating it regularly ever since. It is absolutely delicious, fairly impressive, and very easy.

You will need:

• 250g of Ricotta


• 50g of caster sugar or 2 tablespoons of Splenda


• 75g of raisins and/or sultanas


• 3 egg yolks


• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon


• some grated lemon and/or orange peel

The original recipe says to soak the raisins in warm water for 10 minutes. Feh. Personally, I soak them in a mixture of triple sec and orange juice overnight, which is far better. Then drain the raisins with a sieve and keep the now raisin-flavoured orange liquor.

Beat the egg yolks, ricotta, sugar, and cinnamon together. Mix in the raisins and citrus peel. Pour into three or four greased ramekins and put them in the oven. Repeated experiments on my part have shown that you have a lot of leaway with the baking: somewhere between 150 and 200 degrees for between 15 and 30 minutes. Bake them until they turn a golden colour. (The other day, I tried cooking one big pudding in the amazing George Foreman baking device: it took about twenty-five minutes and tasted as good as ever, so that's another score for George.)

The puddings are equally good hot or cold. Turn them out on to plates when you're ready to serve them. The original recipe claims that this quantity "serves four". Not if one of the four is me, it doesn't. I recommend doubling all the amounts, because these things taste seriously good and you will want more than your fair share once you try them.

The liquid that the raisins were soaked in can be easily turned into a nice sauce in any number of ways. I just mix it with a small amount of custard powder and heat it up. Tuscan pudding is also very good with yoghurt.

Enjoy.


(From The Daily Bread.)