Dessert · British cuisine

Jam Roly-Poly

Name: Jam Roly-Poly
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 50g Butter; 250g Self-raising Flour; 1 small Vanilla; 50g Suet; 150ml Milk; 100g Raspberry Jam; to serve Custard

7 ingredients Cuisine: British Video included

This steamed suet pudding represents a golden age of British home cooking, when resourceful cooks transformed humble pantry staples into showstopping desserts. The technique of rolling jam into dough before steaming creates those beautiful spiral layers you see when you slice it. Suet provides richness and structure that butter alone cannot achieve, while the self-raising flour ensures a tender, almost cloud-like crumb that absorbs custard beautifully.

Instructions

Put a deep roasting tin onto the bottom shelf of the oven, and make sure that there’s another shelf directly above it.

Pull the roasting tin out on its shelf, fill two-thirds with boiling water from the kettle, then carefully slide it back in.

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4.

Tear off a large sheet of foil and greaseproof paper (about 30 x 40cm).

Sit the greaseproof on top of the foil and butter it.

Tip butter, flour and vanilla seeds into a food processor; pulse until the butter has disappeared.

Tip into a mixing bowl.

Stir through the suet, pour in the milk and work together with a cutlery knife until you get a sticky dough.

You may need a drop more milk, depending on your flour.

Tip the dough out onto a floured surface, quickly pat together to smooth, then roll out to a square roughly 25 x 25cm.

Spread the jam all over, leaving a gap along one edge, then roll up from the opposite edge.

Pinch the jam-free edge into the dough where it meets, and pinch the ends roughly, too.

Carefully lift onto the greased paper, join-side down (you might find a flat baking sheet helpful for this), loosely bring up the paper and foil around it, then scrunch together along the edges and ends to seal.

The roly-poly will puff quite a bit during cooking so don’t wrap it tightly.

Lift the parcel directly onto the rack above the tin and cook for 1 hr.

Let the pudding sit for 5 mins before unwrapping, then carefully open the foil and paper, and thickly slice to serve..