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!