One late afternoon my daughter and I fell into a little café in Walton Street in London, looking for a cup of tea and something sweet to give us the energy to push on through one of our “lists of things we have to do while we’re here.” There’s something about travel that gets the adrenaline humming – maybe it’s knowing you might never come this way again, so you don’t want to miss a thing. We were already falling behind on our list when we encountered this blacker-than-black chocolate pudding that looked like sort of a pudding but was maybe a cake, almost as if they’d taken a cake out of the oven too soon. The insides were soft and warm and full of the richest chocolate flavor, though not too sweet. We shared a piece and plotted a strategy for getting the recipe for America’s Table, but, sadly, the girl behind the counter had no idea about how the pudding was made.

I started researching English puddings and playing around with a recipe. It just didn’t seem logical – most recipes said the last step is to pour a couple of cups of hot water over the batter before putting it in the oven and that seemed like a recipe for disaster. And it was. It failed the first few times because I used too much water, but eventually it worked. I added some whipped cream flavored with a bit of rum, for texture, and garnished with violets, which are edible. (You could also use candied violets.) The deep chocolate flavor is achieved through the use of extra dark chocolate cocoa, which I bought online at the King Arthur flour website. (Here’s the link: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/black-cocoa-12-oz) You could also add fresh fruit to this to make it beautifully colorful. It’s a great recipe, once you get past the fact that you have to dump water all over it in order to get it to work!

Prep time: 1 hour

Serves: 4-6

For the rum cream: