I love making pudding cakes. I find them to be both easy and satisfying, especially on a cold evening where the dessert can really warm you up. A basic recipe for one will have egg whites folded into a flavored batter, much like a souffle. Unlike a souffle, however, pudding cakes are baked in a water bath that keeps the bottom portion from puffing up as it cooks, leaving a thick pudding at the base of your baking dish. The top portion of the cake, uninhibited by the insulation of the water bath, bakes into a light, moist sponge cake that provides a perfect contrast for the pudding below.

I baked this batch in individual ramekins, which makes them look a little more elegant than a pudding cake baked in one large dish and scooped out for serving. As an extra touch, I also used Meyer lemons in place of regular lemons. They add a lot of lemon flavor without any of the sharpness that is usually associated with lemons and lemon juice.

 According to a study that was just released, Britons eat the most chocolate per capita, of anyone in the world. The average consumption is about 22 pounds per person. This can be compared to rates of 17.8-lbs per person in Germany, 15-lbs in France, 8.5-lbs in Spain and 4.8-lbs in Italy. The same study also showed that Germans preferred boxed chocolate treats and the French preferred molded chocolate bars. The British seemed to like anything made of milk chocolate, as only 3% of the chocolate consumption was of the dark variety!

For contrast, Americans eat about 12 pounds of chocolate per person per year. Like the British, they prefer milk chocolate to other varieties, though the interest in darker chocolates is steadily increasing. This is most likely a combination of the much-touted health benefits of dark chocolate and simply a greater availability of high-quality dark chocolates that American are developing an appreciation for.