CREME EGG YORKSHIRE PUDDING

To me, William May seems a very formal (and male) name for a chicken. Then again I've never laid an egg, so what do I know?

Happy eggmas! At this special time of year it's always nice to come together with friends and relations and attempt to curse each other with type 2 diabetes via the giving, receiving and tremendous overconsumption of sweet, brown ovals.

As you may remember, last year as a special Easter treat I did a double whammy of a scotch creme egg and superhot cross buns. This year, I've decided my special Easter treat will be not having to eat a packet of Rennies and not choking myself to death on a birds eye chilli, so it's a single whammy instead. But hoist your trousers, madam, because it's a bit of a 2 for 1 anyway. You can't accuse me of not giving value for money! Literally - it's not like anyone pays me to do this.

So what am I doing? Well like a lazy DJ when the first side of Now 98 comes to an end and I have to get off my arse anyway, this week I'm doing a request. Apparently some pub started doing creme egg Yorkshire puddings as part of their Easter menu (specifically, I assume the part headed "Glutton's Corner"), and a friend suggested I have a go at the same. And if there's one thing I am, it's open to a less horrific suggestion than my own idea which was a creme egg rogan josh. So with my intestines almost audibly sighing with relief (or it might just be the 2 wispas I had for breakfast that I got with my own Easter egg), let's crack (attention: egg joke) on!

Ingredients:

There's a whole load of bits you'll need this week, so remember to take the big bag with you to Sainos. You know - not the one from the artisan butchers in town that you bought some sausages from 2 years ago that you keep because you think it impresses people. You can barely fit a 2-pack of bog rolls in that one, let alone all this crap. Besides, the sausages were horrible and full of bits of fennel. They tasted of bloody blackjacks, FFS.

Yorkshire pudding
* 70 g plain flour
* 2 eggs (from William May's bottom ideally, but the output of other flightless birds will suffice)
* 100 ml milk
* a dash of cooking oil
* a square or oblong oven-proof dish - we want one big 'tray-like' pud. That's tray as in a foil serving tray, not your mate Tracey from Essex

Chocolate sponge
* 200 g caster sugar
* 125 g self-raising flour
* 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder
* 1.2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to make up for the fact you misread the recipe and thought it said teaspoons
* 2 more of William's finest
* 125 ml milk
* 75 g of butter or marge, melted
* half a teaspoon, and yes it really is a teaspoon this time (I checked twice), of vanilla extract
* mini eggs to decorate (ooh, fancy!)

Creme egg 'innards'
* 250 g ready-roll fondant icing
* 50 g caster sugar
* 0 eggs (sorry, William)
* yellow gel food colouring
* 50 ml water

Method:

While there are multiple bits to this one, they all have to be done in a certain order or it'll all get considerably more complex than it needs to be. And given there's no need to do this at all so default complexity = 0, that's pretty bloody complex. Probably a 7 at least. Maybe even an 8.2.

To start with, let's tackle the Yorkshire. Get your oven on first to 230 C and put your baking dish in, with the cooking oil in the bottom. Basically, before we pour in the batter the dish needs to be bastard hot. This means it needs to preheat in your oven with it turned up to levels where, when you open the oven door, there's an actual thrust effect like a rocket motor and your house moves slightly. Or I suppose my house might have subsidence. I'd better look into that.

Anyway, while that's on a one-way bus to hot town let's make our batter. Put the flour and eggs in a bowl and give them a good mix. Then slowly add the milk, mixing as you go, and keep agitating it until there are either no lumps or the lumps are small enough that you're past caring.

No, I don't want no lumps, a lump is a guy* that can't get no love** from me.
*clot of undissolved flour
**I dunno. Look, I thought this would work but I didn't know the actual lyrics.

Then, it's into the screaming hot dish in the oven, get the door shut and let it cook for 25 mins. You should then hopefully get something a bit like this:

More rise than Christ on viagra shortly before he undertook an Easter ballooning trip which they left out of the Bible but I'm fairly sure happened.

This is the ideal sort of shape as you're going to fill the middle of course, so you don't want your pud to be super-puffy all over. Apart from anything else, if you leave a puffy one like that on a rack it might look like one of those jackets all the trendy outdoors types are wearing these days. And if those people think you're one of them, before you know it you'll have to go hill walking every weekend and stay in dank accommodation with bunk beds.

Now on to the cake. Get all your dry ingredients in a bowl, and lob all your wet ingredients in a jug except the melted butter, because if you put that in it'll immediately un-melt and congeal into greasy droplets again, and look horrible - as in the pic below. Look, I did this for you because I like to lead by example and not because I didn't think about this happening, honest.

No, it's not a close-up of a single cell. It is a close up of what happens when you apply a single brain cell, however.

Then add your wet stuff to your dry stuff and mix furiously while hoping that the butter will integrate back into the rest of it like the bits that fall off of Robert Patrick in Terminator 2, as opposed to the bits that fall off of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 1, 2, 3 and so on (how many are there now anyway? 6? 8? If I were Skynet I'd have just given up by now and chosen instead to get my revenge by sending myself back in time to the late 1970s disguised as a nerdy guy, who then invents a terrible operating system that annoys millions of people and HANG ON A MINUTE).

Slop your thoroughly mixed cake into a tin, and that goes in the oven for 45 mins at 180 C. And remember to leave your oven door open for a bit first so it cools after the extreme heat needed for the Yorkshire, otherwise your cake will look like you tried to cook it by covering it in diesel and throwing it into a kiln.

While your cake is (hopefully) not burning, you can make your rip-off creme egg filling. Well I say rip-off - this tasted exactly the same to me so I expect Cadburys use the same process, and sugar and water is hardly copyrightable. Though given I don't like creme eggs anyway I can't claim to be a connoisseur. That said, anyone who does claim to be a creme egg connoisseur is this: a fairly shit connoisseur. It's about as weak a claim to fame as saying you own Rochester's 2nd largest collection of antique bedpans.

Anyway, get your fondant out of the antique bedpan you were storing it in and grate it. This will (a) save you about a billion hours trying to melt it later and (b) give you an excellent jacket potato topping for a wasp.

This might be of interest to vegans, as it turns out grated fondant looks a lot like coconut and vegans use coconut in loads of stuff. But not everyone likes coconut, so you could try this instead! Sure, it'll taste totally different but then that's true of trying to make coconut taste like bacon. Because you know what? It doesn't bloody taste of bacon. IT TASTES OF COCONUT, BECAUSE IT'S COCONUT AND EVERYTHING MADE OF COCONUT TASTES LIKE FRIGGING COCONUT. And yes, vegan coconut bacon is a real thing. Just let it go, guys. Let it go.

Once that's shredded, heat up the water in a pan and tip in the sugar. Because obviously, what a load of fondant REALLY needs is more sugar. Once that's warm but not boiling, in goes the grated fondant.

Here, I appear to have accidentally made scrambled creme egg.

You'll need to stir this like the clappers until it all dissolves in, taking it on and off the heat so that it stays runny but doesn't turn into a terrifying pan full of tiny sugary geysers. Then once it's smooth, separate off a small amount and add your yellow food colouring - this will be your yolk.

Righto, let's have a look at that cake. And bugger me, we're 2 for 2 on the 'things that have risen' front. Which makes me wonder - if someone had opened Jesus's cave too early would he have sunk like an underdone sponge, or just stuck to the Turin shroud and needed scraping off with a holy spatula? It's this frustrating lack of detail in the bible that makes me glad to be an atheist.

Don't worry if it's a bit cracked - you're literally going to shove it in a Yorkshire pudding so we're not aiming for cake of the year here.

Let your cake cool a bit on a rack (wire, rather than the medieval torture implement) then slice it in half. You'll then need to trim and chop it to fit nicely into your pud thusly:

Like a glove! On the proviso your gloves are made from cooked batter, and you'll happily maim your hands to get them to fit.

Nearly done now, which is just as well as I also put together a desk from IKEA this weekend so my screwdriver wrist was already aching before all this typing. I really should buy an electric one. A screwdriver, that is - an electric typewriter wouldn't help much at all. In fact, I'm not even sure why you suggested it - what use would an electric typewriter be for putting together a desk?

Oh yes, cake! Scrape a little well out of the middle, and pour in about two thirds of your fondant - white first, then add your yellow bit, as is the traditional sequence in egg simulation circles.

Yes I know the yolk is a bit squiggly, but it's not like anyone will ever see, is it? Oh, apart from this photo I suppose. That's on the internet. Piss.

Now, finally, pop the other half of your cake on top - again trimming to fit - and mix a bit of cocoa in with the last bit of fondant to give you some icing. Throw the mini eggs on to hide the cracks (shut up) and you're finished!

OK, so it looks like an ancient book that's been through a carwash and then 'restored' by a simpleton using part of his mid-morning snack, but I'm bloody pleased with it!

Results:

If you want to make this more in the traditional style of this blog, or just really hate whoever you're giving it to, why not use hollandaise sauce instead of yellow fondant?

Ha! you thought it was going to be shit, didn't you? Well you'd probably be making an informed guess given past results, but it wasn't! It was really really nice and the other 7 people who had some all agreed too! Though now I think of it, I was still holding the large, sharp knife I used to cut it so best take that with a pinch of salt. Unlike the sweet Yorkshire pudding, in this case! Hahahahahahaahahahaha no seriously, don't get me started on salted caramel again.

Happy Ea(s)ter!

Next time: (Why do I still do this? I always change my mind) BIRTHDAY CAKE