It might look ugly but it sure tastes good!

Now do excuse the smudge on the plate. It was only after I'd eaten the pudding that I realised that moving the strawberry was not the best of ideas!
This pudding, another stress reliever is so easy to do and makes a good chocolatey hit after a (lightish) dinner.  It's not my recipe but one that I saw on Matthew Hayden's Home Ground programme. For those of you who don't know Matthew played cricket for Australia very successfully but I'll not say too much about cricketing prowess as the Ashes series is coming up and I'll be cheering for Old Blighty!
 Anyway, the pudding is so simple this is all you have to do:

Chocolate and Macadamia Nut Pudding.

1 cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
.75 cup raw sugar
.5 cup milk
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
½ cup chopped macadamia nuts
¾ cup brown sugar
¼ cup cocoa powder
1¾ cups hot water
Pinch of salt


Vanilla ice-cream, to serve


Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Sift flour, salt and cocoa powder into a bowl and stir in the raw sugar. Add the milk, melted butter and vanilla essence. Mix with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add nuts and stir through. Spoon the mixture into a six-cup capacity ovenproof dish.
Mix the brown sugar and extra cocoa powder together and sprinkle over the cake mixture.
Carefully pour the hot water in at the side. Bake for 45 minutes then let stand for about 5 minutes.
Scoop into bowls with plenty of sauce and serve with vanilla ice-cream.

Mine didn't have a great deal of sauce but the ice cream made up for that.  What a great way to relieve stress!

Stressed is desserts spelled backwards!

OH and I have a subscription to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House. It was our treat to ourselves and I have to say that it's a lovely way to spend a Friday evening. Another great bit of the evening is heading off to Circular Quay straight from work and meeting OH there....it's a bit like having a date! We take ourselves off to find a quick bite to eat before batons up at 8pm.

The other night we tried a little tapas bar in The Rocks (http://www.eatout-sydney.com.au/Inner-Sydney/The-Rocks/Restaurants/The-Vintage-Cafe.html) and it was really lovely. The food was really tasty and there was a guy playing some beautiful guitar music. Anyway, this is a long introduction to the title as on the wall of the bar was a plaque letting us know that stressed was dessert spelled backwards. After seeing that I just had to go home and try a new pudding!

I've done a few things from Tamasin's Weekend Food but this pudding just seemed to hit the mark for a winter pud.

Guards' Pudding

6oz wholemeal breadcrumbs

1oz self raising flour

3oz vanilla caster sugar

1 pot best strawberry jam, full of whole strawberries

3 eggs

4oz melted butter

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Grease a 2pt pudding dish. Mix the breadcrumbs together with the sifted flour and sugar in a large bowl. melt the jam gently and pour it into the bowl at the same time as the whisked eggs and melted butter. Stir together. Dissolve the bicarb in a little warm water and stir it into the pudding.

Pour into the pudding basin and seal with pleated foil and string. Place the pudding on a trivet then pour boiling water to come halfway up the sides of the pudding basin. Cover with a lid and simmer for 2 hours.

Turn out and serve with thick cream.

It was one of the simplest puddings to make but I did make some adjustments.

• I always divide the amount of sugar in half, no one ever seems to notice and it does save a few calories!
• I only had bog standard strawberry jam so used half and made the rest up with frozen strawberries.
• I made a coulis with the remaining frozen strawberries by blitzing them up with some icing sugar and lemon juice and poured it over the pudding just before serving.

What I ended up with was a really light and fruity pudding served with thick custard followed by some very empty plates and no stress!