Where shall I begin? For my third attempt I decided to adapt Delia’s recipe for pear charlotte which, amazingly, is cooked cold. The trick is to soak the sponge fingers in a mix of white wine with dissolved caster sugar and a teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon. They line a bowl covered in clingfilm (yes, really). Into it go the puréed apples (Notts bramleys) with lemon zest and juice. Eek! There weren’t enough, so I filled up the bowl with stewed pears, brambles and figs. I topped with more soaked sponge fingers, poured the rest of the syrup over it, then a layer of clingfilm on top.
A saucer just fitted inside the dish, so on it was supposed to go a weight. I used a pumpkin. It looked silly, but it did the job. The recipe said 6 hours in the fridge, but this had 9. It worked brilliantly! The sponge fingers were thoroughly moist, and the clingfilm came away to reveal a substantial pudding. Since the spice was in the syrup-infused sponge, the tart taste of the fruit came unalloyed alongside it. I served it with cream and it was sensational!
[...] There was only one question remaining about that successful apple Charlotte – the one made cold by letting it stew for hours in a fridge. One of my guests suggested it might have been better served hot. The debate raged, but in the end there is only one way to prove the pudding. Fortunately there was one helping left. A couple of days later I heated it up in a covered dish in the oven, and tried it with cream. [...]