Paolo's Sticky Date and Fig Pudding with Butterscotch Sauce

A dark, sticky date pudding with figs through it, and a butterscotch sauce of brown sugar, cream and butter to pour over it while it is still hot.

Sticky date pudding is the dessert everybody says yes to. Put it on the table and people who said they could not eat another thing find that they can. It is the safest thing you can serve at the end of a long meal, and that is not a small compliment, it means nobody is disappointed and nobody is being polite.

This one has figs in it as well as dates, which is the Christmas version. Dates give a sticky date pudding its dark sweetness and its texture. Dried figs bring something slightly different, a little more perfume and those tiny seeds that give the crumb a bit of grain, and together they make a pudding that is deeper and less one-note than dates alone. The dates are soaked and softened first, which is what makes the pudding dark and moist rather than cakey.

Then the sauce, and this is the part worth being fussy about. Brown sugar, thickened cream and butter, warmed together until it thickens into butterscotch. That is all of it. A real butterscotch sauce made from those three things is a completely different substance from the caramel topping that comes in a bottle, it is smoother, it tastes of butter rather than of sugar, and it soaks into a hot pudding instead of sitting on it. It comes with the pudding, in its own container, to warm through and pour at the table.

Warm the pudding, warm the sauce, pour it over while everything is hot, and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream beside it. That is the whole thing, and it is worth doing in that order, because the moment the sauce goes onto the hot pudding is the moment people stop talking.

Made with ❤️ by Paolo