malva pudding: the creamiest carmeliest spoon dessert ever

 Hello there. I hope you're good, because I'm good. I just made Malva Pudding and my house smells amazing. Malva Pudding is a South African dessert that is basically a brown sugar-colored cake soaked in a bourbon/rum caramel sauce, then served with a luscious velvety vanilla custard. It cannot get much better than this. Especially when you are used to "making do" with sugar grains that too big and cream that doesn't whip. For most recipes I find on the internet or on books, I have to assess how much they rely on ingredients that I can't find here or ingredients that I can find here, yet are different slightly. Did you know that the size of sugar grains greatly affects caramelization or the creaming of sugar into butter (sadly the start of most cookie recipes)? Most of the time, my beloved large sugar works perfectly here. Except when it doesn't and you have ten minutes to make a new dessert for a party you're going to because the sugar crystals didn't melt. So, as you can probably imagine, I absolutely love it when I find a South African recipe that is delicious because it requires absolutely no "translating" on my part. However, I will do my best in "translating" it for my American readers.

If you're terribly confused by the setting of this pudding-photoshoot, It was shot at my favorite place to stay around Kruger park. For those unfamiliar with Kruger Park, it is one of the largest wildlife parks in the world. Our family normally visits the parks when we have visitors. The aim of most people is to catch at least a glimpse of "The Big Five",  the elephant, leopard, lion, cape buffalo, and rhinoceros, named in such a way because they are the five animals found in the park that can kill a man. Over our many visits to the park, we've seen all of the big five, and more. I guess I could say that I've experienced  the stereotype of people galavanting through the African bush with binoculars glued to their foreheads.

The recipe I found for how to make Malva pudding was so utterly delicious that I could not find a single fault with it. Therefore, I don't see the need (or the legal go sign) to type it out here. Here is the link for the recipe. There are two recipes on the page but the one I made was the second one. 



The translations below are for those not familiar with South African recipes.

Bicarbonate of Soda = Baking Soda
Butter = Salted butter (if you only have unsalted butter you can add extra salt. The conversion I normally use is 1/4 teaspoon in 1 (american) stick of butter.)