The Rhubarb Fool

This week, I’ve been watching televised queues of people lining the streets of villages, towns and cities throughout Britain waiting to catch a glimpse of the late Queen’s coffin. This is not for me. Instead, I’ve been working up a recipe I started thinking about during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations earlier in the year.

Out of curiosity, I did make that competition-winning Platinum Jubilee pudding featuring in a BBC TV programme, a confection of canned mandarins, lemon jelly, amaretti biscuits and rather showy white chocolate bark shards. It was OK, but suffered from a serious lack of booze. Oh, and I’m sorry but jelly in a trifle is a definite no-no in our household.

I’ve gone down the more warm and comforting route for my pudding. It’s a white chocolate, whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding with a distinctly Scottish flavour.

I came up with the idea of creating a pudding out of marmalade sandwiches after watching my favourite part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations – the moment where the Queen entertained Paddington Bear at Buckingham Palace, sharing tea and marmalade sandwiches. Charming or sentimental? You decide but it’s surely preferable to being serenaded by Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart…

The next part of the pudding jigsaw puzzle was being tempted by a white chocolate, whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding on the menu at The Ceilidh Place, a brilliant gastropub in Ullapool in far north of Scotland. Sadly, they’d sold out when I came to order it on a visit earlier this year so I had to store the idea away until I was able to make it myself.

The pudding idea finally came together when I found the right whisky to cut through the potentially cloying sweetness of white chocolate and marmalade. Adding whisky to food is a tricky business as there are so many wildly contrasting whisky styles from the heavily peated Islay single malts that knock your head off, to smooth Speyside spirits matured in sherry casks that come close to a fine Cognac.

I chose Royal Lochnagar whisky for two reasons. Firstly, it is made in a charming small distillery at Crathie, bang next-door to the late Queen’s Balmoral Estate and has royal warrants dating back to Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V. Second, it is the perfect complement for marmalade with its candied citrus peel, demerara sugar and spice flavour profile. I’ve been lucky enough to visit both the distillery and Balmoral Castle on separate visits to Royal Deeside. It’s a stunning part of the world and it’s no surprise that the queen chose to spend her final days there.

It took a couple of experiments to refine the recipe and make the flavours sing without any one element being too overpowering. This is my end result and it will be gracing my Sunday dinner table tomorrow as the nation prepares for Monday’s state funeral and we collectively have a quiet moment of self-reflection at the end of an era.

White chocolate, whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding

Serves 6

Ingredients

12 thin slices white bread

Softened butter for spreading on the bread and greasing the baking dish

6 generous tablespoons of your favourite marmalade

150g good quality white chocolate flavoured with vanilla, broken up into squares

425-450 ml whipping cream (or a 300ml pot single cream plus a 150ml pot double cream)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon grated orange zest

3 large eggs

4 tablespoons of your favourite whisky (I used Royal Lochnagar)

Begin by cutting off the crusts from the slices of bread, spreading them sparingly with butter then making 6 marmalade sandwiches using 1 tablespoon of marmalade for each sandwich. Cut each round into four tiny triangular sandwiches.

Butter your baking dish generously then arrange the tiny marmalade sandwiches in decorative overlapping rows in the dish. You need a shallow, ovenproof dish for this. I used a square white porcelain dish approx. 22cm by 22cm by 5cm which worked well.

Place the chocolate, cream, vanilla extract and orange zest in a heatproof bowl and set the bowl over a pan of not quite simmering water. Wait until the chocolate has melted then remove the bowl from the heat and stir well to combine. Allow to cool for a couple of minutes.

In a separate bowl or jug, whisk together the eggs and the whisky, then add the egg mixture to the slightly cooled cream and chocolate mixture and whisk well to combine.

Gently ladle the chocolate mixture over the marmalade sandwiches. Use a fork to press down the sandwiches gently so that they are covered evenly with the chocolate mixture. Depending on the size of your bread slices and, you may not need to use all of the chocolate mixture.

Cover the baking dish with clingfilm and transfer it to the fridge for a minimum of 24 and ideally 48 hours.

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees C fan. Remove the clingfilm and bake the pudding for 30 minutes until the top is crunchy but the interior is still soft and yielding. Leave to stand for 10 minutes before serving with cold cream and maybe a few berries.