Eve’s Pudding with Dates

There seems to have been some procrastination this week and getting around to deciding what recipe to post has taken longer than usual. Thankfully looking through some old photographs gave me the push I needed and coming across this image of an apple hanging from a tree… Eve’s Pudding came to mind. I had almost forgotten about this old-fashioned recipe that we enjoyed as a family dessert, many moons ago.

Sliced tart apples mixed with a little sugar and spice would stew underneath a cake mixture baking on top… filling the kitchen with warming aromas of home baking. We had a few apple trees in our garden back then and the special memories of eating the freshest of apples will forever live in old-fashions recipes, like Eve’s pudding. Forwarding the years and another country, there are no apple trees in our garden but we are blessed with a few dates palms that yeild an abundance of fresh dates each year.

As we love dates I decided to include them in this recipe, but you could try other combinations of fruits with the apples such as plums, rhubarb or peaches. In my store cupboard I keep a small jar of freshly ground pumpkin spice mix, but you can use store-bought mixed spice too. As an alternative you might like to add some lemon or orange zest to the cake mixture instead of vanilla extract. Eve’s pudding is best eaten after baking while still warm from the oven and serving warm custard is almost a need. Either way this family pudding is easy, uncomplicated and comforting… just what you sometimes need.