Highlights and Lowlights in the quest to become a Domestic Goddess...

Ben and I helped to organise a church Halloween party the other week. It went well and we ended up bringing home some of the surplus stuff, including four uncarved pumpkins. They were VERY LARGE so I set myself the goal to try out as many pumpkin recipes I could, until we couldn't eat anymore! We had pumpkin soup on Monday, pumpkin risotto on Tuesday, and I don't usually do a lot of baking, so I was pleased to find a pumpkin and chocolate chip muffin recipe to try out for Wednesday. They looked a bit 'Sainsburys Basics' (I imagined them with the tagline "all shapes and sizes, still yummy")

By the end of the week I was getting a bit more inventive and finally broke free of pumpkin, hooray! I had been wanting to make some kind of steamed pudding for a while, so Ben suggested an amazing plum, prune and orange zest Christmassy one. I was excited! I followed all the instructions and made a special aluminium foil covering with a pleat and a string handle ready for steaming. Here it is...

 Then I steamed it for two hours:

But it came out looking uncooked!!! 

So I thought I'd try to finish it off in the microwave. Sadly it sort of exploded around the plate that was on top if it, and looked like this:

I decided that it had to be cooked after all of that (despite its still gooey and slightly special appearance...) so we ate it.

It tasted pretty good, especially with custard, and none of us were ill so that proves to me it must have been done. As Ben often reminds me, "Presentation is not really your forte!" meaning that things taste good but look pretty bad, but all in all, my steamed pudding was a bit of a domestic failure.

But look at this! I put up this stairgate with my own fair hand. Hurrah, a domestic success!