South African Dessert
MALVA PUDDING
(Malvapoeding)
INGREDIENTS – CAKE
2 tablespoons butter, melted
⅔ cup white sugar
3½ tablespoons apricot jam
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ cup whole milk
¼ teaspoon salt
1¼ cups flour
no-stick spray
INGREDIENTS – SAUCE
1 cup evaporated milk or heavy whipping cream
½ cup brown sugar
5 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
SPECIAL UTENSILS
electric beater
8″ * 8″ baking or casserole dish
Serves 8. Takes 1 hour.
PREPARATION – CAKE
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add 2 tablespoons melted butter and sugar to large mixing bowl. Mix with electric beater set on medium until butter and sugar become creamy. Add apricot jam, baking powder, eggs, milk, and salt. Mix with beater set on medium until mixture becomes fluffy. Gradually add flour, mixing all the while until well blended. Spray baking dish with no-stick spray. Pour batter into baking dish. Bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees or until toothpick inserted into middle comes out clean. Poke holes in cake with fork.
PREPARATION – SAUCE
About 10 minutes before cake is done, add all sauce ingredients to large pan. Cook at medium heat for 5 minutes or until sugar and butter melt, the mixture becomes smooth, and bubbles start to form. Remove from heat and cover. Ladle warm sauce evenly over cake. Let cake sit for 20 minutes to give the cake time to absorb the sauce. Cut cake into 12 pieces. Goes well with vanilla ice cream.
TIDBITS
1) Malva puddings are square. Keyboard keys are square. Keyboard keys were inspired by malva puddings. Because everyone loves malva puddings.
2) Most malva pudding is to be found in South Africa. But there can’t be many South Africa keyboard users and professional typists in comparison to the rest of the world.
3) That’s true now, but in the first year in the existence of the square keys, 98% of the square-key enthusiasts were South African.
4) Indeed, these squarekeyers so loved their malva pudding that they made their keys from fresh malva. As one could imagine, typing with fresh malva was quite squishy. Globs of malva pudding got into everything, particularly the keyboard. Typing became impossible.
5) Everyone knows the surrender ceremony ending the war with Japan was signed on the Battleship Missouri. This document was supposed to have been composed on a square-key typewriter. But the fresh malva keys gummed up the typewriter. No more malva typewriters, no Japanese surrender. No surrender would have meant more atomic bombs, perhaps a bloody invasion of Japan.
6) Which was bad.
7) Fortunately, Corporal Lucy Dubai, reserve typist second class, had her personal round-key with her. Her roundkeyer was made of metal with glass caps.
8) Sure, these keys didn’t give off the same pleasing scent of the square malva keys, but they worked. General MacArthur had Corporal type up the surrender document. The relevant dignitaries signed the surrender terms that very day.
9) Grateful soldiers and marines, scheduled for the invasion of Japan. Lucy Dubai became a wildly popular pinup girl in barracks all over the Pacific Ocean. Her roundkeyer replaced the malvakeyer as the number-one typewriter pinup. Round keys would dominate the world for decades.
10) Culinary anthropologists general credit Lucy* of Olduvai Gorge with inventing the first roundkeyer. So, you’d think that round keys would dominate the world to the very moment that you’re reading this tidbit.
11) However, much of humanity left Africa after Lucy’s invention. Those who went to Europe would favor square keys. This bias can be found in their DNA. However, the tribes who stayed in Africa and those who trekked to Asia preferred round keys. Waves of squarekeyers and roundkeyers would eventually wash up on the shores of North America causing tension and conflict in the United States that haunts us to this very day.
12) Then how did squares conquer the modern keyboard world? It has something to do with a bar bet at the Blue Armadillo in 1993. There, now you know.
13) * = Corporal Lucy Dubai could trace direct descent from Lucy of Olduvai Gorge.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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