My Kitchen Café #9: Honey Rum Pudding With Kris Ngoei

Once again, for reasons beyond me, My Kitchen Café had remained closed last month. Its time I opened the doors again, and this month I invite you all to meet another blogger friend and fellow Daring Baker whose bakes and photography I am an admirer of.
He lives in Thailand and bakes in Paris! Unusual (or impossible) as this seems, he manages this by blogging about his dessert creations at his site called Bake in Paris. If you haven’t seen them before, I recommend a visit to his sit and I can guarantee that you won’t be disappointed.

My guest today is Kris who is a graphic designer by profession. When he’s not working at his “regular” job, he is following his passions of creating drop-dead gorgeous desserts and taking the most beautiful pictures of them to share with us. He says it was an unexpected encounter with a lemon meringue pie that got him started on baking, and eventually food styling and photography.

It is said that the proof is in the pudding, and it seems rather apt that Kris has chosen to share a pudding with us today. I’m sure you will agree that his pictures bear this out. And on to Kris.......

I have never baked anything with vegetarian in mind. That is why when Aparna emailed proposing to me to do a guest post, it was pretty much a challenge. It wasn’t an easy thing for me but I told myself I would try to come up with something simple yet interesting enough, and of course vegetarian.

My initial idea was a dessert from coconut because there are just so many local desserts using coconut milk as the main ingredient. But I do not want it to be a Thai dessert, or maybe I should have just posted a Thai dessert? Who knows some readers actually expected to see more Thai delicacy from someone who is blogging from Thailand (yes, put that in your comment and I will see what I can do with it….). But for now, I keep the global concept in mind. Don’t know why, maybe it will be just easier for everyone to digest.

So then came the idea of pudding. The ingredients are supposed to be from potatoes or something like that. So I dug out some old recipes given by my eldest sister long long time ago. Believe it or not, my sister used to bake a lot when she was young and had plenty of unique recipes compiled and I inherited them when she finally abandoned baking altogether.

After a couple of adjustments here and there, the recipe came together as one piece - simple and easy-to-follow and with very straight forward steps of preparation. For most of you who have the chance to try it, the result should be satisfactory. And oh yes, try to stay around your oven the whole time because you will absolutely love the aroma. Have a good try and enjoy baking! And to my sis, “if you happen to read this, thank you for being an inspiration!”



Honey Rum Pudding

(Prepares one 7.5” pie mould, of 1” height)

Ingredients:


Vegetable shortening  40 grams

Sweet potatoes – peeled and coarsely grated  200 grams

Rum  35ml

Egg  50 grams

Honey  100ml

Salt  1/4 teaspoon

Cheddar cheese – grated  30 grams

Method:


Preheat the oven to 175C (350F).

Melt vegetable shortening. Set aside to cool.

Combine grated sweet potatoes with rum. Mix well and set aside.

Beat egg until pale and fluffy. Fold in honey, melted shortening, salt and finally sweet potato mixture. Mix well. The batter is about 450 grams.

Pour into pie mould. Bake for 55-60 minutes until pudding is brown and cooked. Make sure it is not overcooked or the color will become dark brown.
Leave on wire rack to cool. Sprinkle with grated cheddar cheese and serve either hot or cold.


The copyright for this post and photographs rests with Kriswirata Ngoei of Bake in Paris and are reproduced here with his permission.