Steamed Sponge Recipe

As some of you may know, I used to write another blog for the shop where my husband used to work. It was a mixture of old fashioned recipes, silly videos of my attempts at sausage making and behind the scenes stories.

This blog isn’t around anymore and, although the videos are still on my You Tube channel, the rest of the posts have gone to the website in the sky.

I thought it was a shame for some of the fabulous old fashioned recipes to vanish so I thought that I would transfer my favourites onto here.

The recipes were from a wonderful lady called Mrs. Marson, she used to be the cook at the local primary school.

I posted several of her recipes but my favourite was her steamed sponge recipe. This definitely still needs to be available on the internet so here it is.

Mrs. Marson’s Steamed Sponge Recipe

I was quite excited when I found Mrs. Marson’s Steamed Sponge recipe as (in the age of modern technology) I have never steamed a pudding. I couldn’t wait to try the traditional method, rather than pop it in a microwave.

I went to buy a pudding mould, which was also very exciting, and I set to work. Things were going well until, after 2 hours of steaming, my pudding still wasn’t cooked. After exploring all of the potential problems I realised that I had made one very silly mistake. I hadn’t put a lid on the saucepan! As the pudding mould had it’s own lid I had assumed that the saucepan didn’t need one. Oh dear!

My pudding took 2 hours uncovered and half an hour covered. I think if I had put a lid on the saucepan from the start it would have taken about an hour.

I did make one other mistake that was very fortunate! The quantity of jam on the recipe was for 100 servings and I added the same amount to a pudding that served 8. You could use a little less but I definitely wouldn’t divide this by 100! I think the reason behind a small amount of jam would have been to save money when cooking for many school children. When you are making a small pudding for a few people the more jam the better! I would add the same amount next time.

Mrs. Marson’s Steamed Sponge

Ingredients

8oz Flour

1/2oz Baking Powder

4oz Marg. (I used butter)

4oz Sugar

1 Egg

8oz Jam 😉

Water

Method

2) Beat the egg and beat it into the creamed mixture.

3) Sieve flour and baking powder.

4) Add gradually to the creamed mixture with sufficient water to give a soft consistency.

* I added 5 tablespoons of water, alternating with the dry ingredients.

5) Put the jam in the bottom of a greased tin, cover with the sponge mixture and steam.

* Make sure you put a lid on the saucepan.

6) Eat on it’s own or covered with custard.

The pudding was delicious!!! I will be definitely making this again! There are also several variations on the recipe, which I can’t wait to try. You can replace the jam with lemon curd, marmalade or syrup. You can add a variety of dried fruit. You can also make a ginger sponge by adding 1/2oz of ginger to the dried ingredients and stirring 2oz of syrup into the mixture.

I also loved Mrs. Marson’s Bakewell Tart recipe. I will posts that on this blog soon.