Prune & Chinese Five Spice Sticky Toffee Pudding with Miso Butterscotch Sauce

Hello and welcome to Newsletter No 7 here on Substack! Thank you for stopping by. Grab a seat if you are interested in recipes as well as tips and tricks to make the most of our increasingly eclectic pantries - and make sure you hit that subscribe button if you don’t want to miss any future posts!

We renovated our kitchen a couple of years ago. And while playing around in the kitchen is easily my number one passion, after one too many months of eating take-out and one pan meals prepared in our little makeshift living room kitchen consisting of not much more than a single hot plate, it actually took me a bit of time to find my groove again once our beautiful new kitchen was installed. So I forced myself to start cooking and baking again by inviting friends over for dinner. And that is how I also came up with the recipe for today’s newsletter. 

There was a late summer Italian-inspired dinner with my friend Hannelore featuring a salad with rucola, figs, mozzarella di bufala and prosciutto di San Daniele with pillowy homemade spelt focaccia, spaghetti alla chitarra with beautiful vongole from my favourite fishmonger and to finish, wobbly corn panna cotta with blueberry compote, all washed down with a nice bottle of Fiano. 

A few weeks later we had my friend Camille over to catch up over Grapefruit Mezcal sours, Tuna and Coconut Ceviche, Guacamole and Tortilla chips, followed by Cuban Ropa Vieja with rice and beans and, to finish a coconut Tres Leches cake with fresh passion fruit. 

And our friends Ana and Viktor joined us for a Middle East inspired dinner featuring phyllo-wrapped feta parcels drizzled with za’atar honey, Reem Kassis’ Manti on garlic yoghurt with a fresh tomato relish and Aleppo chili butter, and a carrot cake with saffron, mahleb and cardamom with a labneh frosting. 

And as temperatures continued to drop our friends Miki and Gijs joined us for a vegetarian dinner featuring Sqirl’s “Kabbouleh” with Sourdough Bread and Miso-Walnut-Date compound butter, Ottolenghi’s outrageously good Spicy Mushroom Lasagne (the most phenomenal vegetarian lasagne I have ever eaten) and, to finish, the Prune Sticky Toffee Pudding with Chinese Five Spice Powder, Miso Butterscotch Sauce and Vanilla ice cream you see pictured here. 

As I discovered writing this post, I am clearly not the first person to make Sticky Toffee Pudding with prunes instead of the more common dates. But after sharing my own version of a Prune Sticky Toffee Pudding I hopefully won’t be the last either! Because prunes are a brilliant alternative to dates in Sticky Toffee Pudding - like dates they become beautifully soft once soaked in hot water and give the sponge this gorgeous velvety yet bouncy and beautifully moist crumb. Where dates are mellow and caramel like in flavour, prunes bring some fruitiness and a tiny bit of acidity which works well with the rich sponge and even richer Miso Butterscotch Sauce. And the whole thing becomes even more delicious with a generous helping of warming Chinese five spice powder in the sponge. 

A mix of cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds, Sichuan peppercorns and star anise, Chinese five spice powder is what makes Peking duck so delicious. And while it's more commonly used in savoury cooking, none of Chinese Five Spice Powder’s ingredients speak against using it in baking or desserts. Those Sichuan peppercorns you might ask? They are great actually because they provide a bit of heat - a welcome addition to any fall baking or desserts made with apples, pears, plums, quince and/or dried fruit.

And while I cannot take credit for the idea of a Miso Butterscotch Sauce, I am here to spread its gospel. If you like salted butter caramel, you will adore any sort of Miso and caramelised sugar concoction. If you are wondering why you should add Miso to your Butterscotch Sauce when you could just reach for salt, here is why: Miso provides a more mellow saltiness than using plain salt and also has a much more complex flavour profile. Just try it and maybe start with a white Miso (also known as Shiro Miso) which, thanks to a shorter fermentation time, is mellower in flavour than some of the darker Miso variants.