Judging by the comments when I posted a picture of my recipe-testing efforts for this column, I seem to be the one of the few people who didn’t grow up with some version of this dessert, which Arabella Boxer describes as “a good hot pudding, quick and simple to make, which has been all but forgotten”. Known variously as lemon surprise, lemon delight and even magic lemon pudding, it’s a winter dessert of the sharp and zesty kind, rather than comfortingly solid type, with a “charming little surprise”, to quote Margaret Costa, in the form of the sauce that appears, as if by magic, in the bottom of the dish after baking. A proper pudding, with the royal seal of approval from Mary Berry, Delia Smith and Nigel Slater, but without the stodge.
