Self-saucing Chocolate Pudding

I am seriously getting a kick out of the turn of the seasons, and snuggling about at home in the evenings with slippers on and comfort food.  Also, given that I'm not drinking at the moment, I have a lot of spare calories to ingest.  This generally means dessert.  Never once a huge dessert eater, I am rocking them with regularity at the moment.

The king of the meals this week was the steak and oven chips with salad Leith put together on Wednesday night, followed by this here chocolate pudding.  Now the Thomas family apparently inherited a pudding recipe with near-magical qualities, the likes of which other puddings can't compare.  This recipe has since been lost, and so ever since we've been meandering through various recipes*.  And this Wednesday, I made one worthy of a post.  Dense, chocolatey, with a fudgy sauce.  Fudginess is just so, so important in a self-saucing pudding.  Wouldn't you agree?  And easy peasy to make.  I know all about those recipes that involve melted chocolate and cooled liquid butter and goodness knows what else.  But as far as I'm concerned, if a recipe for self-saucing pudding isn't unbelievably easy to make, then it's dead to me.  Dead, I tells ya.  I want to know that I will have all the ingredients without having to get off the couch to look.  I want to cook it in the same dish I mix it so there's minimal dishes.  I want to eat it no more than 30 minutes after I think of it.  In those terms, this recipe can deliver...

Ingredients:

• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons cocoa
• 80 grams butter
• 1 cup milk
• splash vanilla essence

Sauce

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 4 heaped tablespoons cocoa
• 2 cups boiling water

Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.  Boil the kettle.  Take out your pudding dish.  This may or may not be a much loved hand-me-down Corningware dish from which you ate pudding as a child.

In a heavy casserole dish, mix the flour, sugar and cocoa.  Melt the butter and add this to the dish, with the milk and vanilla.  Stir.

Mix the extra brown sugar and cocoa and sprinkle evenly over the pudding batter.  Pour over two cups of boiling water (pour the water over the back of a spoon so that it doesn't disturb the surface of the pudding too much).

Put in the oven for 30 minutes.  Remove.  Eat**.

*I want you guys to know that I'm talking about over a couple of years here.  Not every night or anything.  We're not that out of control.  Yet.

**Look, I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if you're wooing someone or generally want to express love for somebody and maybe who knows? also hoping to get some action,... make this pudding for them.  Because, let's face it, anyone who can create an incredible, hot, chocolatey dessert that comes with its own goddam sauce in 30 minutes is looking pretty good. Amirite? Alright.