On a trip to the British Isles a couple of years ago, in a pub in Stratford Upon Avon, I discovered Sticky Toffee Pudding. The deliciousness of the moist warm cake topped with a sticky sugary sauce and whipped cream is a treasured food and flavor moment. I can still visualize the pub and I cherish the camaraderie of the friends I was dining with. I came home from the trip with plans to make the delicious pudding. Finally, two years later I got around to making this tasty dessert. The motivation for eventually getting me to bake this pudding was the annual sleepover I have with my nieces. For the most part my nieces and I are the only girls in our families, with all brothers, and for 15 years we’ve gotten together for an evening of family fun -- celebrating the few girls in the family. Each year the sleepover has a theme and this year’s was “Celebrating our British Heritage.” We have many ancestors from England and Scotland and my recent DNA test indicated I am 82% British. So, my quest to learn how to make Sticky Toffee Pudding began. Here is what I came up with.

​My book club just finished reading The Nazi Officer’s Wife. A true account of how a Jewish woman, Edith Beer, survived the terrible events of the Holocaust and World War II. In the book she mentions eating strudel, so I thought that would be a great treat to serve for book club.

I’ve never made strudel so I started searching the web for recipes, specifically apple strudel, because it is fall and my backyard tree is full of apples. I found a variety of apple strudel recipes, some had raisins, some didn’t.  Some added nuts to the apple mixture and some layered ground nuts in the dough. The one’s that “appeared” more authentic used toasted bread crumbs somewhere. What was used for pastry was as different as each baker themselves – some made homemade pastry so thin you could see through it, some used canned crescent dough, and other’s frozen phyllo dough. I even consulted our culinary arts faculty member at work (I work at a university) and he showed me a recipe from his pastry course. My version is compilation of all those recipes I found. Despite being my first try it was delicious and was surprisingly easy to make.