Hollygog Pudding

For this month's Random Recipe challenge Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked us to come up with desserts and to pick a random recipe from one of our cookbooks dedicated to desserts, cakes or puddings. I suppose it just proves that I like more general cookbooks, but after a quick search through the bookshelves I found only one such book: “The National Trust Book of Traditional Puddings” by Sara Paston-Williams, published in the eighties. (Although this particular book is now out of print the National Trust currently sell several books that cover much the same ground and seem to be derived largely from this original collection of recipes).

There were two recipes on the randomly chosen page in the book: I could have selected a roly-poly pudding, but who could turn down the opportunity to make something called Hollygog pudding? The original recipe comes from Kiddington in Oxfordshire and, in fact, it is a kind of roly-poly pudding filled with golden syrup and cooked in milk. Not the sort of dish I make very often and maybe a little more suited to midwinter than spring, but it's old-fashioned, unashamed comfort food. And that can't be bad.


225 g plain flour
Pinch of salt
125 g butter or lard, diced (I used butter)
About 3 tbsp cold water
4 tbsp golden syrup, warmed
About 250 ml milk

Sieve the flour and salt into a mixing bowl and rub the butter or lard into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add enough of the water to form a stiff dough.

Roll out on a floured surface into a rectangular strip. (Don’t try to make it too thin or it will start to break up). Spread with the golden syrup and roll up like a Swiss roll.

Put into a buttered ovenproof dish and pour in enough milk to come about halfway up the side of the pudding. Bake at 200°C for 30-45 minutes. The pastry should have taken on a light golden colour and much of the milk will have disappeared.

Cut the roll into slices and serve hot with plenty of custard or cream and maybe a little drizzle of yet more golden syrup.