Exploding Chocolate Pudding

Make your dinner party go with a bang, or rather a snap, crackle and pop...! Serves 4.

• 200g digestive biscuits, crushed
• 50g butter, melted
• 284ml/half pint double cream
• 200g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
• 2 medium eggs
• 75ml milk
• Strawberries for decoration
• 1 pack space dust or pop rocks*

Melt the butter and mix with the biscuit crumbs. Press lightly into four ramekin dishes, ensuring that the base is completely covered. Chill the ramekins in the freezer. It might be worth making a spare pudding or two if you have enough ingredients left over - one pudding is never enough for some people, and besides, if you have an accident in the kitchen and lose one of your puddings, it's worth keeping one spare!

Bring the cream gently to the boil, watching it and stirring it constantly. Pour it over the chocolate and stir patiently until all the chocolate is melted. Don't do things the other way round, adding the chocolate to the cream - the chocolate needs to melt gently!

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and milk. When the cream is cooled, add the egg mixture, bit by bit, stirring constantly to make a thick, velvety chocolate cream, hopefully with no bits of scrambled egg in it! Pour the chocolate mixture into the ramekins and bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for around 15 minutes, or until the chocolate sets. Remove and cool.

Now, the fun bit. Entirely optional - you could just serve the puddings chilled with some fresh fruit, but if you really want to show off, make a deep but thin well in the centre of each pudding using a chopstick, and gently pour in a small amount - you won't need much - of space dust*, using a piece of folded paper as a makeshift funnel. Sealing the hole can be done using any spare cooked chocolate mixture and a piping bag (you did make that spare pudding, didn't you?) or perhaps a couple of strategically-placed strawberry pieces. If you do use the piping bag method, then remember that you've got about a two minute window to serve the pudding before the space dust loses its sparkle.

Serve, and, remember... always stand back from lit fireworks...

* Space dust, as legend would have it, was banned in the mid 1980s when people allegedly started feeding it to dogs and/or eating vast quantities washed down with fizzy pop, in the mistaken belief that the resultant explosion would indeed blast you into space. I was delighted to discover that, in fact, not only is it not banned, but available from my local confectioner, Sweet Memory from Westcliff (call 01702 213636 for details!) They even sell space dust at 1970s prices, but number one, do not feed it to your dog under any circumstances, and number two, be careful if you buy the "colour changing" space dust, because nothing will put your guests off like noticing that the bottom of their pudding has turned bright green!

Virgin on the ridiculous

For the last few years now, in fact since they switched from an analogue service to a digital one, it has been my considered opinion that the service provided by Virgin Media (formerly Telewest Broadband) has been going rapidly downhill. I don't watch a lot of television, anyway, but it's not much to ask that after a long day, I can have the opportunity to flop out in front of the idiot's lantern for a few minutes and chill my boots.

Of course, back in the day of analogue television, you could just switch on and watch merrily away until your brain turned to porridge, but the succession of digital set-top boxes supplied to me by Virgin have all had a habit of switching themselves off whenever they like, and of course, as Sod's Law dictates, this will tend to be at the exact moment you want to watch something. On average, my box has been breaking down twice a year, necessitating one of those irritating visits from a technician who will be booked to arrive between 8am and 1pm, then turn up at half past six, muttering under his breath about unpaid overtime.

Having not watched any television for a few days, I came in on Wednesday to try and set my PVR to record the excellent Charlie Brooker's Newswipe later that evening, but the box had gone and frozen, and that handy technical fix de nos jours, the reboot, wasn't working either.

My call to the technical support line was answered first by a computer with an irritatingly cheery voice (“Hellooo! And welcome to Virgin Media! You now have six options...”) then I was put on hold. You really would have thought that with dozens of radio stations to choose from, Virgin could play one of these when people are put on hold, instead of a repeated loop of the same three tracks. I gave up waiting after twenty minutes.

The following night, there was still no television service. I rang the number again and got through to someone this time (the call was answered in Mumbai, a far cry from the days when all the calls were answered in Basildon!) but amazingly, I was confronted with the prospect of having to wait several days for a technician to call. I reluctantly agreed to this, on the basis that I insisted on a call back from the technical support department some time in the next twenty-four hours, to confirm the appointment time. I added that because I was so fed-up of the way I was (and continue to be) treated by Virgin Media, that I would cancel my television service altogether if it wasn't repaired by the weekend. Needless to say, that phone call never came.

It actually took yet another of my phone calls to Bombay, on the Friday evening, for someone to be able to tell me that an engineer had been booked for the following Monday. I expressed my dissatisfaction that nobody had bothered to call me, and, feeling slightly defeated, steeled myself for a weekend without the luxury of television.

And then, on Saturday, I stumbled across an offer in my local branch of Maplin to buy a FreeSat decoder for £40. No contracts, no hassle – all I had to do was connect it up to the redundant satellite dish that's been sitting on my roof ever since I moved in. And within three seconds of powering it up, I had over 1200 television channels at my disposal, and about 400 more radio stations. (Not that there's suddenly anything worth watching, of course – I had deleted all but 75 of the channels within an hour, but that's not the point!)

I rang Virgin to cancel the engineer's visit, but this time I was put through to their retentions team in Sheffield, whose job it is to firefight the presumably ever-increasing torrent of dissatisfied customers by offering them hefty discounts. Amazingly, I have been given so many of these sweeteners ever since I went digital, that I am only paying 50% of their regular price.

The helpful and intelligent young lady I spoke to was really quite disappointed to hear my story, and sympathetically suggested that I write a letter to complain. What really rankled though, was her admission that had I gone through to the Sheffield team in the first place, they could have sent me an engineer within fifteen minutes. How nice to know, and what a wonderful way to treat a customer of fifteen years' standing.