Sticky toffee pudding, inspired by Moribyan: what we did with the Ramadan dates

Sticky toffee pudding is the pub pudding that never left: a soft, dark sponge made with dates, drowned in toffee sauce, usually with cream, custard or vanilla ice cream melting into the edges. Every version online makes roughly the same promise. You can have the pub one at home, out of one tin, without a steamer or a pudding basin in sight.

We'd never made it. In our heads it was restaurant food, the thing you order when someone else is paying and you've already had a starter. What changed our minds was Moribyan's video, which T sent to S on a wet Sunday at the start of October with no message, just the link. In our marriage that counts as a formal request. We're not going to narrate her video here: go and watch it on her page. What follows is our own version, inspired by it and argued over in a small London kitchen.

There was also a practical reason. Like a lot of homes we know, ours came out of Ramadan with more dates than two people could sensibly eat. A half-finished box of Medjool had been sitting at the back of the cupboard since March, giving us a look every time we reached for the rice. Sticky toffee pudding, it turns out, is the best possible use for them.

We're not marking anyone's homework here. But there's a reason this pudding keeps turning up in people's feeds, and most of it has nothing to do with the algorithm.

• It takes a dessert people think of as restaurant food and shows it's really a traybake. One tin, one bowl, one saucepan. The scariest equipment involved is a skewer.
• The sauce pour. Nobody scrolls past toffee sliding over a dark square of sponge, and it's honest, too: the sauce isn't decoration, it's half the pudding.
• Dates as the quiet hero. Soaked and mashed, they vanish into the sponge and make it damp and almost malty. T's younger brother, who has picked dates out of everything since he was six, ate two squares and asked what made it so dark. We told him afterwards. He's taking it well.
• It makes a pub classic feel like home cooking. For a lot of British Muslim families, pub puddings came with a small question mark over the sauce. Making it yourself answers the question, because you know exactly what went in the pan.

Whatever any video does, these are the things we think make or break a sticky toffee pudding, and they're baked into our version below:

• Soak the dates in boiling water (or tea, see below) with the bicarbonate of soda. The bicarb softens the skins so they break down into a smooth, dark purée instead of chewy lumps.
• Dark muscovado in the sponge, light muscovado in the sauce. The sponge gets depth and a little bitterness, and the sauce stays glossy and toffee-ish rather than tasting burnt.
• Poke the hot sponge and pour some sauce over it straight from the oven, so it soaks in. The rest goes on at the table.
• A pinch of flaky salt in the sauce. It's sweet enough already; salt makes it taste of toffee rather than just sugar.

Then there are the changes that are just us. Three made the final version. One didn't.

1. Soak the dates in strong tea

S here. This came from staring at the soaking bowl and thinking it looked exactly like the bottom of a mug of builders' tea. Swapping the water for a mug of strong black tea, brewed for three minutes with the bag taken out, gives the sponge a faint tannic backbone, a bit like the edge you get from black treacle. It doesn't taste of tea. It tastes like the pudding has been to the gym. If you don't drink tea in your house (does that happen?), plain boiling water is completely fine.

2. Cardamom instead of mixed spice

T here. Mixed spice makes it taste like Christmas, which is lovely in December and slightly confusing in October. A quarter teaspoon of ground cardamom makes it taste like the box of mishti someone brings round after a wedding, which is what dates and brown sugar were always trying to be. Grind the seeds from about five green pods yourself if you can: the jar stuff loses its perfume fast. It's optional. Leave the spice out entirely and it's still a very good pudding.

3. A metal tin, not the pretty dish

Our first bake went into a ceramic dish because it was the one we'd want to put on the table. Ceramic heats slowly, so by the time the edges were done, the middle was still damp in the wrong way and sagged as it cooled. A 20cm square metal tin cooked it evenly in 32 minutes. Serve it from a nice plate instead.

The one that didn't make it: less sugar

On the second bake T asked, very reasonably, whether a pudding that comes with its own sauce really needs 150g of sugar in the sponge as well. We cut it to 120g. The sponge came out paler, drier and oddly bready, because in a cake like this sugar isn't just sweetness: it holds on to moisture and helps it brown. We put it back to 150g. If you want it less sweet overall, be stingier with the sauce at the table, or serve it with cold unsweetened cream.

We baked it three times, on three weekends in October, in our fan oven. Everything else stayed the same unless it's mentioned below: same flour, same eggs, same 20cm tin from bake two onwards.

• Bake 1: the Ramadan Medjool dates, soaked in boiling water with the bicarb and mashed with a fork. Mixed spice. Baked in the ceramic dish. It needed 42 minutes instead of 35, the middle dipped as it cooled, and S let the sauce bubble for nearly five minutes while answering the door to a parcel, which took it a shade too dark. Still delicious. Also, one of the 'pitted' dates wasn't, and S found the stone with a molar.
• Bake 2: the Medjool had run out, so we used a bag of cheaper, drier supermarket dates. Soaked a little longer (15 minutes) and blitzed with a stick blender, they were fine. This was the reduced-sugar test, and it's the reason the sugar went back up. Metal tin from here on, 33 minutes.
• Bake 3: tea for the soak, cardamom instead of mixed spice, sugar back to 150g, metal tin. Out at 32 minutes, with a skewer showing a few damp crumbs. Poked, sauced and left for ten minutes. We had four friends round that Saturday and all nine squares went, with a short, polite stand-off over the last one. This is the version below.

We don't put scores on other people's recipes, so this verdict is about our version only.

It's very, very good, and it's not a weeknight pudding. Plan it for a Sunday, or for when people are coming round and you'd like them to think you tried harder than you did. Hands-on, it's half an hour. The rest is the oven and a bit of patience. One square is plenty, which is not a sentence either of us expected to write.

The tea and the cardamom are the bits we'd fight for. The salt in the sauce is non-negotiable. And the leftovers are almost better than the first night: the sponge drinks up the sauce overnight in the fridge, and a square reheated until it's steaming is the reason the box of dates is now on the shopping list on purpose.

Go and watch Moribyan's video for her take, then try ours. If you'd like it for two people instead of nine, or need a version without eggs, Jan can scale it and talk you through the swaps.