A Sticky Situation
Sticky Toffee Pudding – a sort of soft brown sugar cake with a heavenly toffee sauce that melts in your mouth and leaves you dreaming about the next bite. My first experience with STP was in Scotland 5 years ago, and from henceforth my life has been defined by “BSTP” (Before Sticky Toffee Pudding) and “ASTP” (After Sticky Toffee Pudding). Trust me – it’s the kind of dessert that deserves overly dramatic descriptions, and I consider it my duty as a devotee to oblige.
One day just before Thanksgiving I found myself in the commercial kitchen of the restaurant at the Merc, tasked with making Sticky Toffee Pudding as a possible dessert for the menu. As a new employee feeling some measure of self-imposed pressure to impress, I armed myself with a recipe that made individual puddings in a muffin tin (instead one big pudding in a pan that you cut into squares), embraced the “I can do this!” spirit, and forged ahead.
It’s not a difficult recipe, mind you, but I must admit that finding my way around a completely unfamiliar commercial kitchen was a “wee” bit out of my comfort zone. I don’t use rolling bins full of flour and bricks of butter from a walk-in refrigerator on a daily basis. Even more intimidating was an oven the size and shape of a sleeping giant in the corner daring me wake it up. But my confidence rose as I worked through each step and finally popped the pan of 24 muffin-sized Sticky Toffee Puddings in the oven (it’s important at this point in the story to take note of the amount of batter that is). The hard part was done, and soon my job as a Sticky Toffee Pudding evangelist would be complete.
The first indication I had that things weren’t as they should be was when I peeked into the oven and saw Sticky Toffee Pudding lava oozing over the side of the muffin tin and pooling on the oven floor. I had divided the batter evenly among the muffin wells as the recipe had instructed, but they were too full – causing them (like my confidence in that moment) to rise, collapse, and dissipate. There was nothing to do except to watch helplessly as batter made its escape, a complete mess, and a fool out of me.
As part of my initiation as a new Draper Village employee, I am grateful that everyone in the kitchen got a kick out of my “sticky situation,” and I was able to laugh along. To STP’s credit, even the baked-on batter that I had to scrap out of the oven was delicious and got passed around among the staff to try. But even so, I successfully made a (much smaller) batch the next morning – to redeem the good name of Sticky Toffee Pudding, of course. 😊
Written By:
Elizabeth Kinghorn