Scottish Toffee Pudding Cake

Scottish Toffee Pudding Cake

1C pitted dates

1 C water

1 tsp baking soda

Combine above ingredients in your blender jar and blend until smooth, then extra 90 seconds (or use Hot Soup setting on your Blendtec).  Then add to jar:

1/4 C butter (1/2 stick)

3/4 C sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

Blend until creamy and lastly add:

3/4 C flour

 and blend just until mixed.  It should be thin like batter.

Pour into a greased 11x7 pan and bake at 350º for 30-40 minutes.

When it's done, set the cake to cool for a few minutes while you make the toffee sauce (below).  Once a little cool, slice the cake into about one inch cubes.  Separate cake pieces with a fork to pour the sauce in between each one and around the edges.

"The Sauce"

3/4 C brown sugar

1/2 C butter (1 stick)

3/4 C heavy cream

Add above ingredients to sauce pan and heat until thick without boiling.  If you have any sauce left over after pouring between the pieces, just pour it on top.  If you make and slice the cake ahead of time, you can make it piping hot again if you pour the sauce on it just before serving.  Optionally, you can save some sauce to do a drizzle on the plate as well.  For the photo above, I did a drizzle with some of the heavy cream that was left.

Note:  I love this recipe.  It is an old, Scottish family recipe of Chef Brad, the Grain Chef who I met at the BYU Education Week classes on whole grain nutrition.  He has many great recipes,and most of them are much healthier!  I actually attended a private cooking class at the Bosch Kitchen Center with a personal trainer friend when this was revealed.  Fun memories.  

There's no question that this is a "treat" best made only once or twice a year.  I have tried to modify it and make a healthier version, but it's my family's consensus that it's just not worth it.  The Sauce really can't be modified well, and using whole grain flour instead just changes the texture.  My advice: make this as dessert, THOROUGHLY ENJOY YOUR SMALL PORTION, and invite friends  over to help you finish it so it doesn't stay in your kitchen after that first night.

If you want to feel a little better about it, add a scoop of Blendfresh Green to the batter (you won't taste it with everything else going on), and when your done, drink a tall glass of water with a scoop of Blendfresh Spouted Fiber Blend to bind with some of the fat and minimize the damage!

And Bliadhna Mhath Ùr (Gaelic for Happy New Year!)

"Perfectly Chocolate" Cake

"Perfectly Chocolate" Cake

Add the following to your blender jar (use Wildside if you have a Blendtec blender);

2 C sugar

1 3/4 C flour

3/4 C cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 scoop Blendfresh Green (optional)

1/2 - 1 scoop Blendfresh Sprouted Fiber blend (optional)

Pulse a few times until the dry ingredients are well mixed.  Then add;

2 eggs

1 C milk

1/2 C coconut oil

2 tsp vanilla

Mix for about 40 seconds in blender, then add

1 C boiling water

Mix together and pour into a sprayed a 9x13 pan.  Bake at 350º for 35-40 minutes.  As an option add up to a cup of walnuts.  

For frosting I like to sprinkle a 1/2 - 1 Cup of chocolate chips on top of the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven.  After about a minute the chips will be melted enough to spread over the cake with a butter knife and cool as cake topping.

The Blendfresh Green scoop you will not notice the taste of.  It will just add nutrition to what could possibly be a dessert of very little nutritional value - just a fun treat once in a while, which this should be.  If you add 1/2 scoop of Fiber you probably won't notice it, but if you add a whole scoop of fiber you may want to add 3 Tbsp of water to keep your cake from becoming dry.  Use this rule of thumb with any cake or baked item that you want to add the extra Fiber to.

This is my adaptation of the "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake from the Hershey's Recipe Collection Cookbook, 2008.