No South African household should be without a few traditional Cape Malay recipe books and my well-thumbed collection of local cookery books are regularly called to duty, particularly in winter when warm baked puddings are a vital part of every meal.

One of my favourite Kaapse kos books is Zainab Lagardien’s Traditional Cape Malay Cooking which appeared in 2008 in its new guise after first being published (and sold out) as Everyday Cape Malay Cooking in the late nineties.

It is in this book that she writes about the baked date pudding, her favourite pudding and "an olden time dessert learnt from my granny." It always takes me back to my very young childhood days when I used to spend rainy days in my gran's large old kitchen in Bredasdorp with its wood-burning stove, keeping warm and enjoying the smells that came from the oven.

Sad that so many old family recipes have just faded away…. I’ve been lucky because  my mother knew all my granny’s recipes (plus a lot more, begged, borrowed and taught to her by relatives and elderly home cooks in the small town she grew up in) and she passed them on to me.

But I digress, so let's get back to today's warm belly treat. To serve up to six portions of this delicious baked date pudding you need:

Ingredients

1x250g stoneless dates

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

4 cups self-raising flour

`/2 teaspoon ground mixed spice

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

A pinch of salt

90g soft butter

½ cup soft brown sugar

2 large eggs, beaten

250ml milk

1 tablespoon oil

A pinch of salt

Method

Cream the butter, sugar and egg together.

Add the milk, oil and salt.

Mix the dry ingredients together except the dates and add the egg mixture

Add the dates to the mixture and mix well.

Turn out on a greased ovenproof dish.

Bake on the middle shelf at 180 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes and serve with custard.

And don’t be surprised if the bowls are cleaned and held out for seconds...