A date to remember: Make a date with gooey and heavenly sticky toffee pudding

All right, it’s official. I’ve got spring fever. I’ve now seen every sign that foretells spring’s arrival: bumble bees, crocuses, daffodils, a few over-eager cherry blossoms and stacks of matzo boxes in grocery stores.

I’ve also got what I call TGFs, or Twitchy Garden Fingers. They don’t want to be typing on a keyboard. They want to be digging in the garden. I want dirt under my nails, maybe a few splinters or ant bites and scratches from thorny roses. As I’m trying to drift off to sleep at night — annoyingly, something that takes me about five times longer than it does my husband — I’m thinking about garden improvement projects more than I’m ruminating on world events (for a change).

Inside my house, I’m paying attention to projects that just seemed too tedious to tackle during the winter. I’m not really a spring cleaner. (Nothing is ever swept under the rug in our house because I don’t sweep under rugs. And please just ignore those smeary cat-nose marks on our back door, just like I’m ignoring the spider eggs attached to the outside of our kitchen window. Let sleeping spiders lie, I always say. Please, please let them lie.) However, I am definitely a spring rearranger. Knickknacks travel from here to there and I might hang up a few small pieces of art, over the objections of my husband, who believes, perhaps not erroneously, that we already have too much art on the walls. He doesn’t say anything, of course. He just vibrates at a frequency that expresses subtle but emphatic displeasure.

The final, irrefutable proof of spring’s nearness is that Monday is St. Patrick’s Day. A reader quite reasonably suggested that I make a recipe in honor of the holiday and so I shall — or rather, I will sort of. Sticky toffee pudding isn’t a traditional Irish dessert, but it does come from the British Isles, and I have it on good authority (aka the internet) that Irish people do eat it. It’s not pudding in the American sense but in the English sense of anything served as a dessert. It’s also one of my husband’s favorite sweet treats. I suppose it behooves me to make it for him after cluttering up his walls and shelves for so many years.

Sticky toffee pudding also plays a starring role in one of our fondest memories. Twenty-three years ago, we took a trip with my husband’s family to the Lake District in northern England. The area is somewhat similar in climate to the Northwest. (Think ferns, waterfalls and lively brooks in a land of vertiginous inclines and green gullies.) One afternoon, after hiking up to see the beautiful Aira Force Falls, we sought to quench our thirst at a pub in a nearby village. The pub was rather inconveniently located on top of a very steep hill. We hesitated for a moment but then pressed on. When we arrived at the top, we were exhausted but not disappointed by the pub, which was dark, cozy and fire-lit. After polishing off pints of cider, we ordered the dessert special: sticky toffee pudding. It was a superlative dessert experience that we’ll both recall to the end of our days.

Maybe that particular sticky toffee pudding can’t be replicated, but my husband will certainly appreciate the gesture. Traditional sticky toffee pudding — a sweet, gooey date cake doused with toffee sauce — owes its wonderfully soft texture to steaming, but you might appreciate that I’m giving you a simpler recipe that you bake like a regular cake and then drizzle with toffee sauce. (If you do want to make a classic steamed pudding, check out this recipe from Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking: biggerbolderbaking.com/sticky-toffee-pudding-recipe/.)

The first thing you should do, which I most certainly did not do because I deemed it far too much bother, is boil the dates in advance so they can cool before being added to the batter. I boiled the dates as instructed, stirred in baking soda (it makes a tremendous fizz but helps soften the dates for a smoother cake) and then put them in the freezer for a scant five minutes. They were still steaming hot when I added them to the dough and they probably immediately liquefied the butter and scrambled the eggs. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to make a bit of difference to the cake, which turned out soft and fluffy through and through. But no matter what it does or doesn’t do to the cake, I don’t want you to burn yourself so please behave responsibly with your date-boiling.

I enhanced the recipe (in my not-too-humble opinion) by adding 2 teaspoons of fresh orange zest — 1 teaspoon in the batter and 1 teaspoon in the sauce — and it’s mwah! Chef’s kiss. I also added warm spices like ginger, nutmeg and cloves, although you can omit the spices if you prefer, like my beloved husband, to exist in a state of spicelessness. He’s so lucky that I’ve come along to enrich his life and make him eat things he’d rather not, don’t you think?

Even with all those spices, my husband loved the cake and I was also extremely pleased with how it turned out. He didn’t specifically mention the perfect sticky toffee pudding we’d had in the cozy Lake District pub, but I knew he was thinking about it. How could I tell? Because he was vibrating at a frequency that expressed subtle but emphatic pleasure.

Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake

2 cups chopped dates

2 1/2 cups water

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 2/3 cups sugar

4 large eggs, room temperature

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 teaspoon orange zest

3 1/4 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon ginger

1/4 teaspoon each nutmeg and cloves

Toffee sauce:

½ cup butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon orange zest

½ cup heavy cream, plus 1½ cups for optional whipping

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a small saucepan, bring dates and water to a boil, then turn to low and simmer for five minutes. Remove from heat and stir in baking soda. Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, vanilla and orange zest and beat well. In another bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and spices. Incorporate flour mixture into butter mixture a little at a time. Stir in semicooled date mixture.

Transfer to a greased 13-inch-by-9-inch baking pan. Bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 50-55 minutes. Leave in pan to cool slightly.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, melt 1/2 cup butter with 1 cup packed brown sugar and 1/2 cup heavy cream. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer five minutes, stirring constantly, until slightly thickened.

Using a fork or skewer, poke holes all over the top of the cake and pour half the toffee sauce over the top. Reserve the rest to serve with the warm cake, along with the rest of the cream, sweetened and whipped to soft peaks.