Nigella’s Christmas Feast: Warm chocolate, tahini and banana pudding 

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Nigella’s Christmas Feast: Warm chocolate, tahini and banana pudding

By Nigella Lawson

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A warm, soft and squidgy cake, it is both embracingly cosy and almost regally sumptuous. You could serve it just with crème fraîche, a little bit of tang to offset the pudding-cake’s richness, but I stir 4 tsp of tahini into 250ml of double cream and whisk gently by hand and for not very long, until it’s softly whipped. And I don’t stop there: after I’ve dolloped the tahini cream on to my pud, I drizzle over some (shop-bought, not homemade) date molasses, which is like sticky toffee pudding in syrup form.

A wholly plant-based version of the gorgeous Warm Chocolate, Tahini and Banana Pudding is in easy reach, too: simply omit the eggs and up the bananas to 700g, the tahini to 150g and, in place of the Greek yogurt, I use almond-soy yogurt; dark chocolate chips should be dairy-free anyway, but do check the packet. The pudding won’t rise much without the eggs, but it will taste every bit as magnificent. And the oat-milk crème fraîche you used to make the beetroot sauce makes a fabulous accompaniment to the pud.

SERVES 4-6

500g (approx 4 medium) very ripe or overripe bananas (skin-on weight)

120ml olive or vegetable oil

100g tahini, at room temperature

100g full-fat Greek yogurt, at room temperature

2 large eggs, at room temperature

100g caster sugar

100g soft dark brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

120g plain flour (or gluten-free plain flour)

50g cocoa

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp fine sea salt

200g dark chocolate chips

  • Heat the oven to 180C/ 160C fan/gas 4 and get out a 23cm round pie dish (or similar size dish, about 1.5 litres in volume).
  • Peel the bananas and, either by hand or using an electric mixer, mash the bananas then beat in the oil. Beat in the tahini then the yogurt. Now beat in the egg, then the sugars and vanilla.
  • Whisk or fork together the flour, cocoa, bicarb and salt and slowly beat into the batter and when you can no longer see any specks of white, fold in the chocolate chips with a bendy spatula, which you will need to scrape the runny batter into the ovenproof dish.
  • Cook for 40-45 minutes, depending on whether you want it to have a gooily molten centre or not. Once it’s out of the oven, let it stand for 5-10 minutes before diving in for that first squidgy spoonful.