Feed your hungry hordes with this pudding that is made in minutes

This pudding is truly a wonderful thing – quick to rustle up for hungry loved ones with a craving for something sweet.

This is an edited extract from For the Love of Lemons by Letitia Clark (Quadrille, $55). Photography by Charlotte Bland.

When I was a child, if we went on holiday to a place where lemons grew – Cyprus or Italy, say – my mother would always stop to photograph them, before stooping to gather windfalls, which she would smuggle home in her suitcase. Throughout her life she has tried and failed to cultivate lemons at home in England. She’s not alone in this citrus worship; it’s something I have inherited, and writers through the centuries have also documented. While travelling in Spain in 1905, Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend, “I am amazed that we should live in England ... when we might roll in bliss every moment of the day and sit and drink coffee on a balcony overlooking lemon trees.” Long live the lemon!

This pudding is truly a wonderful thing – quick to rustle up for hungry loved ones with a craving for something sweet.

Try too my creamy lemon linguine.

Letitia Clark loves lemons. Photography Charlotte Bland

A pudding to whip up in a few minutes flat.

Lemon self-saucing pudding

Ingredients

• 60g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
• 180g (1 cup minus 1½ tablespoons) caster sugar
• Zest and juice of 2 large lemons
• 3 eggs, separated
• 60g (scant ½ cup) plain or 00 flour
• 300ml (1¼ cups) whole milk
• Good pinch of salt
• Cream, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan-forced). Lightly butter a deep ovenproof dish. Cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until well combined. Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time, until incorporated. Fold in the flour and the milk until you have a smooth batter, then gradually mix in the lemon juice.
2. In a separate bowl whisk the egg whites with the salt until they form soft peaks; carefully fold into the batter. Decant the mixture into the buttered dish and stand it in a roasting tin filled with water to come halfway up the side of the dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until golden. Eat warm, with cold cream.

Serves 4-6