@ the coffee cake: Uh....that looks AMAZING....I'm hungry now...
@the cookbook: Okay, so I hardly ever cook at all but...I think I'd give some of those recipes a try just for the sake of the Narnia-ness. 😆

*cuts a virtual slice for you* 😀
Perhaps if I make one that sounds very Narnian and tastes amazing, I’ll copy the recipe to the thread.

Please do Ariel!

(exactly how many puddings are there and what exactly qualifies something to be a pudding anyway? Best I can figure is that it’s poured into a mold, baked, and holds its shape when taken out. Can someone more versed in English food explain?)

Pudding in the old sense of the word is a kind of cake with a thick sauce poured over it. I think eventually people started just making the thick sauce and that's what we call pudding now.

When my grandmother used to make Christmas pudding, it was a kind of cake cooked by steaming in jars with raisins and grated carrot and potato in the batter, and then served with a thick caramel sauce.

And then there's Yorkshire pudding which is basically a kind of bread that you pour gravy on.

Hm, so it's the sauce that makes the distinction between a cake and a pudding? Interesting. Thanks for the explanation, Swan! (Yorkshire pudding especially now makes way more sense in that light.)

I somehow missed this in May - May was crazy for me. Mrs Beeton is quite an old standard, I understand. And there's the Townsends channel on YouTube, where they do a lot of videos of 18th century recipes, if you're further interested in the history of cooking. They have a number of puddings, too. Then there's Mrs Crocombe / The Victorian Way series that the English Heritage channel does - with the warning that Mrs Crocombe was cooking in a large manor house, so their recipes aren't always your *everyday* Victorian recipes. Both are just about the wholesomest thing on YouTube these days, highly popular and highly recommended. 🙂

Cool! I’d say I’d have to check them out if I remember to, but I just know I’d forget.... -_-

Today is the 65th anniversary of HHB's publication, so I wanted to make something for it. I chose to whip up some fool. Man, this stuff must have been amazing to Shasta, who's probably never even heard of whipped cream or eaten anything so light and cool. The yellowy one is gooseberry, but as I couldn't get my hands on fresh gooseberries, I had to settle with using gooseberry jam and then toning it down a little with some applesauce. The purpley one is blueberry 'cause I couldn't get mulberries (not even sure they're remotely available where I'm at...). So yeah, I had to cheat, but they tasted great all the same. 😀

So cool Ariel! I never really knew what a fool (in the food sense) was before 🙂 That's such a great way to celebrate HHB's birthday.

If you made a Narnian cook book, I would buy it.

I had no clue what it was either until I looked it up for this!
Heh, I’m flattered, but I’m so dependent on others’ recipes that none of them would be mine. It does make me curious about the Narnia cookbooks that are out there, though.

So cool Ariel! I never really knew was a fool (in the food sense) was before 🙂 That's such a great way to celebrate HHB's birthday.
If you made a Narnian cook book, I would buy it.

I wasn't familiar with it either at, Swanny.

I had no clue what it was either until I looked it up for this!
Heh, I’m flattered, but I’m so dependent on others’ recipes that none of them would be mine. It does make me curious about the Narnia cookbooks that are out there, though.

I have the Narnia cookbook on Kindle and I could pass along any recipes if you wanted, Ariel. Those also look very tasty, Ariel!

That’s kind of you to offer, Lil. I’d love to take a peek at those recipes!

I love gooseberry fools. We have two gooseberry bushes in the old garden that usually yield just enough for a batch and some straight-into-the-mouth eating, so as soon as I found a recipe for gooseberry fools in a cookbook (it is translated so I suspect it took me several years to find out that's what they were, though 😀 ), that's what I started doing with them.
And I shamelessly wrote them into one of my Narnia stories. 😀
... which reminds me in a roundabout way that last year, I wrote a whole story about the marmalade in Mrs Beaver's marmalade rolls, and did some research into what those rolls may have looked like, and never got around to trying them out...

That’s cool, marmota! (Gotta love it when you enjoy a food so much that you write about it!)

Just you wait till I write in blueberries somewhere! 😀

In more seriousness, I do smuggle in foods I like but have to do it very carefully and choose them carefully so that it makes sense in the Narnian context. 😉 It's a bit silly to write characters who enjoy your own favourite food; it would be silly for me to write about a Narnian character whose favourite food is my favourite Moravian Wallachian soup... But if your character ought to enjoy their food, it makes sense to write it from the position where you do enjoy it yourself, in a "write what you know" kind of sense.

So I found a recipe a while back for the drink that Jadis gives Edmund. It's called "Edmund's Downfall"; It was really good and my family loved it! I didn't have egg so I used half a banana instead and it was WOW! Like, if Jadis gave me it, I would have told her anything she wanted. Especially when I was a kid! Also, it tastes like Mexican champurrado