Australian · Dessert
Golden Syrup Dumplings
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 150 g plain flour
- 8 g baking powder (2 tsp)
- 1 g fine salt
- 30 g cold unsalted butter, in small dice
- 1 egg, cold, lightly beaten
- 40 ml cold whole milk
- 500 ml water
- 150 g golden syrup
- 100 g dark brown sugar
- 30 g unsalted butter, for the syrup
- 15 ml lemon juice (1 tbsp)
- 200 ml pouring cream, cold, to serve
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilKnife cuts: dice, julienne, biasRubbing fat into flour
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub the cold diced butter into the flour, baking powder and salt with your fingertips until it looks like coarse sand with a few flat flakes of butter still showing. Stop there.
- Cut in the egg and milk with a table knife to a soft, shaggy dough that just holds together, and do not knead it.
- Bring the water, golden syrup, brown sugar, 30 g butter and lemon juice to a simmer in a wide pan, stirring until the sugar has gone and the syrup smells faintly of toffee.
- Drop in 8 spoonfuls of dough with a thumb of space between them, cover, and hold at a bare simmer for 20 minutes without lifting the lid, until a skewer pushed into the largest comes out clean. 20 min
- Lift the dumplings into bowls, then boil the syrup hard for 8 minutes to 10 minutes, until it has reduced by about half and coats the back of a spoon, pour it back over and serve with the cold cream. 8 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rubbing fat into flour 47 recipes
- The fat is cold when it starts and still firm when the rubbing stops, and the bowl has not warmed under the hands.
- Stopped early, while it still looks like coarse crumbs with pieces of fat visible in it, not worked on to a smooth even sand, which means the pieces have gone.
- Nothing is greasy or glossy and nothing has smeared into a paste against the side of the bowl.
- Liquid added last and only enough to bring it together: pressed, it just holds, with no wet patch and nothing sticking to the hand.
- Rested cold before it is rolled or shaped, so the gluten relaxes and the fat firms again after being handled.
Where it goes wrong The fat was too warm, or it was rubbed until the mixture looked uniform. Once the fat has melted into the flour there are no solid pieces left to steam apart in the oven, so the bake is sandy or tough instead of flaky, and nothing done later puts those layers back.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.