Molten Dark Chocolate, Fig and Orange Pudding

I’m sitting here on a rainy Saturday afternoon post work, polishing off the very last remaining corner of this dark chocolate, fig and orange pudding. How can I convince you to make it? It’s like a cross between a flourless chocolate cake and a chocolate self saucing pudding – heavy on the dark chocolate, molten and warm and rich and perfect puddled with melting vanilla ice cream. It’s perfumed with a little orange zest, nutty with ground almonds and studded with oozing roasted figs. It’s not as fiddly as a cake – the whole point is to under bake it, jiggly centred with a just set outer crust: every texture from crackly-outside-piece-of-brownie through to lava-like-interior in a satisfying scoop. If you don’t like figs or orange, leave them out entirely for chocolate purism or swap for other things on hand – fresh berries, roast plums, poached pear, a teaspoon of ground coffee, hazelnuts over almonds.

And a selection of other things I’ve been enjoying this week..

• Avoiding the news, besides a morning skim of the headlines. Not burying in the sand, just attempting to avoid being bogged down in a heap of endless live streams that rarely break new ground.
• Joy the Baker’s Let it Be Sunday column : a round up of lovely things and interesting pieces of the internet you would probably otherwise never come across. Better than the aforementioned news.
• Hot cross buns – this year’s selection has included the frontrunner homemade Tivoli Road Bakery recipe, a queue for the Attica bakehouse version permeated with anise myrtle, ground strawberry gum and native fruit spice and topped with finger lime glaze (you can find the recipe here) , and the rich, crusty sour cherry and chocolate iteration by Baker Bleu.
• Reading on the couch, armed with cups of the ippudo hojicha tea that snuck into my luggage from Tokyo. Just finished The Sympathizer – would highly recommend.
• Ruby Tandoh’s Good Food Things – lists of tiny food moments, easily forgotten, that add up to something special – think ‘tidying up’ the edge of a cake; hot butter sliding across a cold pan; the smell of hot doughnuts on the pier; saving the best til last. Find them on her instagram and twitter.
• My new favourite pour over coffee maker thanks to Market Lane, best served steaming with aforementioned hot cross buns.
• An entire morning spent constructing Ottolenghi’s s’mores cookies – peanut butter shortbread sandwiched with fiddly single egg white marshmallow and dunked in dark chocolate. Entirely worth it.