On Friday evening, I finally got to attend a pudding club evening. I had been talking about going for about 5 years and was really looking forward to finally getting there!
It’s been held in the Three Ways House Hotel for the last 30 years, and has become pretty well known, during the opening talk we were told about a number of celebrity chefs that have visited over the years. It is even possible to stay in a pudding themed room after the pudding club.
On arrival there is a short introductory talk about the evening and then you are seated at one of 6 tables, each table seats 12, so unless you are a big group you will be sat with other people. There were just 2 of us so we were sat with 3 other groups.
The evening starts with a small main course, almost starter sized, we had 3 to choose from, fishcakes, vegetable risotto and beef with mushroom gravy, there are also big bowls of vegetables for everyone to share. We both went for the beef as we didn’t want anything too carby and filling. This course was delicious the beef was beautifully tender and the gravy was full of flavour.
Then the main part of the evening begins, with a talk through each of the 7 puddings on offer that night. They are then paraded into the room to a serving counter. Each table is called up one at a time to be served a portion of pudding, and the host mentioned that this is timed to mean that each table will get pudding roughly every 14 minutes!
The order that you eat the puddings in is totally up to you, also the pudding club used to have a rule that you had to finish one portion before you could go for your next, but this is no longer the case.
By the time I had seen all the puddings come in I was very excited to get stuck in and determined to make it through all 7!
Sticky toffee, chocolate and autumn pudding
My first choice was sticky toffee and date pudding, this was a tasty pudding, not mind-blowing but you really can’t go wrong with sticky toffee and lashings of custard. This ended up being my favourite pudding of the night.
I then moved onto the plum crumble with custard, this was okay, there was a lot of fruit and only a small amount of crumble, usually I would prefer more crumble but maybe in this case it was a good thing as you don’t want to get too full on one pudding. The main negative I found with this one was that it was heavily spiced with cinnamon, which isn’t something I enjoy.
Next was the passion fruit roulade, this was one of the worst ‘puddings’ of the evening. Every pudding club will have one cold pudding and this was ours. The meringue had no crunch to it at all, it was just very soft and almost wet, and there was far too much passion fruit filling which was overly sweetened. The people we were sat next to also disliked this pudding and most people couldn’t finish the small slice.
Passion fruit roulade
By this point I was getting quite disappointed with the quality of the puddings, so I went for the chocolate pudding, something I generally enjoy. It was a nicely flavoured chocolate pudding, but a little too heavy and cakey, this was served with a thick chocolate sauce which was almost a ganache.
The jam roly poly, is the last pudding that I had a full portion of, it was a suet roly poly rather than sponge. This was also not very popular with anyone on our table, there was only a very small amount of jam in the pudding and overall the pudding was just very tasteless. The only way to add any flavour to it was to cover it in the extra jam sauce provided, but this just reminded me of the very sweet strawberry jam that I used to have in school.
Jam roly poly
I didn’t stop eating puddings here because of being full, it was just due to being disappointed at the quality of the puddings. But as I wanted to try them all I had a spoonful of the last 2.
The bread and butter pudding was something that my friend was most looking forward to as it is their favourite, this was very disappointing and tasteless. For me it was my first taste of a traditional bread and butter pudding, as I usually make it with cake such as Panettone or Stollen, and it definitely didn’t convert me.
Lastly the autumn pudding, this was full of fruit, including citrus peel, which is a flavour I don’t like at all. So while this pudding was well made and generally got okay reviews, I just disliked the flavour.
Overall, we had a great evening and it was nice to sit next to other people and talk about the puddings. However, we were very disappointed with the quality of the puddings and had expected much better. Around the room, it was obvious that some people had loved it, and had attended multiple times. I think as something that has been going so long, we expected the puddings to be outstanding and very refined, but instead they were very average and it some cases quite far below average. They also didn’t seem to use very good quality ingredients which was a shame. I wouldn’t recommend the pudding club night here, however their main course was delicious and the surroundings were lovely, so I would recommend a trip for dinner, and then the sticky toffee pudding for dessert.
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