Closely Monitor The Water Level For A Perfect Treacle Pudding

It's a classic English dessert. 

The treacle pudding may not look like much on the surface; it is a dark caramel brown, cake-like sweet, drenched in syrup. You'll sometimes find it baked in one pan, but more often than not it will be baked in individual dishes. This particular pudding recipe (not a pudding in the way Americans imagine it) is over two centuries old. According to British Food: A History, treacle pudding, since its conception, has been popular among the less affluent citizens of the British commonwealth and that's because the recipe was initially quite simple: bread and treacle. For those of you unfamiliar with the term "treacle" is a sugar-based substance similar to molasses in both looks and flavor and was only invented in the 1880s. This is around the time the treacle pudding became a popular after-dinner snack for those who couldn't afford fruits and candies. 

Treacle pudding today is a little more complicated than syrup-drenched bread. Instead, the steamed treacle pudding is beloved throughout the British Isles in Ireland and England and is known to be a perfectly moist, and sugar-saturated dish served with a topping of clotted cream and even more syrup drizzled on after baking (via BBC Good Food).

This dessert is rich tasting and a wonderful way to treat yourself at the end of any hard day when you need a bit of a pick-me-up. However, making this dish is a bit more complicated than tossing a boxed brownie mix in the oven or scooping a bit of ice cream from the tub. The Bigger Bolder Baking describes the treacle pudding as a steamed cake. Yep, you read that right: Steamed. After mixing up the batter for this spongy dish, you must pour it into a pudding dish with some treacle at the bottom of the pan and cover it with greaseproof paper and tin foil, and place it into a steamer for up to two hours to cook. The British Broadcasting Services says another way you can cook a treacle pudding is by placing ramekins in a large saucepan and pouring boiling water until it reaches halfway up the dishes and then cover with a lid.

But whether you use a stovetop and saucepan or have a steamer, Masterclass tells us that we must keep a careful eye on water levels during the cooking process. There must be enough water boiling for significant steam to bake the pudding. If there isn't sufficient water, then there isn't sufficient steam and your treacle pudding will not bake evenly and may turn out a mess.