Two years ago, I made my first "pudding cake", a cake that has two distinct layers – a traditional cake layer and underneath a layer of pudding, which serves as a sauce of sorts for the cake.
The magic of the cake is that you bake the cake in an inverted fashion from how it ultimately forms. In other words, the final result is cake on top and pudding on the bottom, but before it goes into the oven, it's a pudding layer on top and cake batter on the bottom. Somehow during the baking process, not only the layers switch, but also they don't somehow just mix together into one uniform consistency. Magic!
Above is the final baked Gingerbread Pudding cake, and below is the cake before it went into the oven. How did those layers reverse??
The cake was also relatively easy to prepare and can easily be a weeknight cake. You the prepare the layers separately – first cake, then pudding.
The pudding layer consists of a melted butter / water mixture, combined with brown sugar and cornstarch.
I made one ingredient substitution with this attempt – nonfat vanilla almond milk for the milk because that's what I had on hand – and I noticed no difference with the final product. I did though over-bake the cake because I didn't realize I should only insert the testing toothpick into the cake layer to test for no crumbs. Instead, I inserted the toothpick into both the cake and pudding layers and obviously the pudding would stay wet throughout, which led to me keeping the cake in the oven for far too long! Lesson learned.
This is a great cake for winter – warm, rich, and moist from the pudding, and infused throughout with classic winter spices. I look forward to making it again and again!
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