Summer Pudding

Summer Pudding is a traditional dessert. It is a splendid way of using up surplus raspberries. It needs no cooking, except a little heating up on top of the stove.

Ingredients
raspberries
sugar
2-4 slices of white bread

Equipment

saucepan
wooden spoon
bread knife and bread board
sieve
2 bowls

preparation time:
heat raspberries
line bowl with bread
keep in fridge until cool, say 12 hours

Cooking process

If you pick your own raspberries, they need .
Line a bowl with thin slices of white bread with the crusts cut off. You will need to cut the slices into pieces that fit round the edge of the bowl. There should be bread on the bottom of the bowl as well, and have some ready for the top.
The amount of sugar is up to you. Half the amount of sugar to raspberries will make a sweet dish, or less if you prefer it not so sweet.
Put the raspberries and sugar in the saucepan and heat them while stirring to stop them burning. (You may prefer to put the raspberries in first to heat a little until the juices start to flow, or even add a little water). Heat until there is quite a bit of juice, and all the sugar is dissolved.
Pour the raspberry mixture through a sieve so the juice flows into another bowl. Then put the raspberry mix into the bread lined bowl, and put the last pieces of bread on top. Now pour the juice carefully over the top of the pudding. Make sure that all the top gets some juice, and then check that there aren't any air pockets round the edge. The juice should flow down getting soaked up by the bread.
This will need to cool before eating. Put it in the fridge for several hours, or overnight, perhaps with cling film on top to stop it picking up other flavours.
To serve, you can .
You can pour over some single cream, or it's perfectly nice just eaten as it is.

Other ideas

Whenever I have seen recipes for summer pudding, they suggest putting a weight on top of the pudding to squeeze out the juice into the bread. Quite apart from the problem of finding a heavy weight the right size, and fitting all this into the fridge, I find this tends to leave the top of the bread without enough juice, and it stays white, and gets soggy. My technique, of cooking the raspberries, then sieving out the juice and pouring it over the top bread, makes sure that all the bread gets soaked in juice.
You can use other similar fruit to raspberries. A lot of people think that red currants are good, but I find them a little over-powering. Blackberries are fine if you can get enough.
You can make a small summer pudding with half the amount of ingredients and a small bowl. You will probably need more than half the amount of bread.
An alternative technique.... Still use fruit, sugar and bread, and cook the raspberries and seive out the juice as before. But rather than lining the bowl with bread, cut the bread into chunks (quite small). Mix the seived raspberies with the bread, then pour the juice on top. The advanatge of this is that you can decide how much bread (lining the bowl required a specific amount, which was never a whole number of slices!) But it also seems to lead to soggier bread. Soggy is good, because this dish depends on the bread soaked in raspberry juice. Disadvantages - it doesn't look as good, as the raspberry pips are visible at the top. And I don't know if you could turn it out. Still, I think I prefer this way.