Marmalade toast sponge pudding

This winter has been the coldest in a while here in Sydney, and it's been raining for what feels like weeks. I've been really embracing puddings lately and this one is a recent revelation. The recipe comes from Jess Elliot Dennison, a Scottish cook whose recipes are in regular rotation in my repertoire. Her sticky triple ginger cake is a favourite, and now this genius pantry-cupboard pudding that utilises two ingredients I am extremely fond of and thus never without: sourdough bread, and marmalade. It comes together quickly, uses just one egg (a bonus in these dark times of avian flu and eye-watering egg prices) and offers comfort from the cold, and the dark. A bit of decadent dairy is a good accompaniment - ice cream of course, but plain old single cream is simple and delicious, especially soaked in to the sponge.

Do-It-All cake

I am turning into my mother. She told me it would happen, more than once, with a wicked - borderline evil - smile on her face. And now it has. I have little flecks of grey around my temples, exactly where she had them, am evangelical about public libraries... and I simply cannot bear to let the smallest skerrick of food go to waste. I am constantly making ricotta (and freezing it) with milk about to expire, or zesting citrus I need for juice (another ziplock bag freezer stash) or burying bits and pieces of wilting greens in curries. Last week I had half a carton of cream in my fridge to use up. Happily, it was exactly the amount needed for this recipe, which I'd had bookmarked for ages since first reading about it on Food52. 

 
It's the simple cakes I gravitate most to these days. This one - dubbed Do-It-All Cake - by its author, Danish cook Nadine Levy Redzepi (wife of René, head chef and founder of Noma in Copenhagen) is monk-like in its simplicity. But that's probably not the right analogy for something so rich, delicious and slightly subversive. The latter comes from the use of salted butter, rather than the traditional unsalted, and additionally, a light sprinkling of sea salt over the batter before it goes in the oven, which perfectly balances the creamy sweetness of it all. 

This cake is the very definition of something being more than the sum of its parts. All the ingredients are everyday ones, there's nothing more to making it than a bit of beating and folding but it leaves your whole house smelling amazing and tastes incredible with a cup of black coffee. I wish I could make it for my mum but it does the next best thing, by making me think of her.