hot patootie, it's choclafoutis!

I thought I'd just document this, as much for my future reference as anything else, but also because it's simple and pretty delicious and THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW, dammit.

Anyway, you'll remember my original post about the damson clafoutis which I made with the by-products of the 2010-vintage damson gin. Your canonical clafoutis is made with cherries, so I was already diverging somewhat from orthodoxy, but further divergence is possible, not to mention delicious. I have in the past made clafoutis with various kinds of leftover fruit, the one with the apricots being particularly good, but if you ditch the idea of fruit altogether then all sorts of interesting results are possible. On one occasion we had one of those Jamaican ginger cakes left over from some family do or other, so I decided to make use of the standard clafoutis batter recipe and make a sort of ginger cake-y posh bread and butter pudding. Slice the cake up into half-inch-thick slices, layer them in a dish, batter on, oven, bish bosh, sorted.

So when we were required to bring along a dessert to a dinner party with some friends on Saturday, I remembered the couple of packs of Aldi pains au chocolat that we'd had cluttering up the freezer for a while, and decided to batter some sense into them. I amended the recipe slightly as I needed to bulk up the quantity of batter to match the extra bulk (not to mention height) of the bread, so I've put the amended version, as closely as I can remember it, below.

• 12 pains au chocolat
• 80g plain flour
• 140g caster sugar (note that I've reduced the relative amount of sugar compared with the damson recipe, for the hopefully obvious reason that damsons need more sweetening)
• 5 eggs
• a pinch of salt
• 750ml of milk, i.e. not quite a pint and a half
• a dessertspoonful of decent cocoa powder

Whisk all that lot (except the bread) together; don't worry if the resulting batter looks scarily thin and runny, it always looks like that. Cut up the pains au chocolat into slices (5 per pain worked for me) and layer them in a 20cm by 30cm deep-ish dish - a dozen pains made two layers just about exactly for me. Bake at 180-200°C for about 45 minutes until it's nice and brown on top but still a bit wobbly. Serve with some vanilla ice cream.