This pudding is one of the first things I ever learnt to cook and I never stopped.

It has everything a go-to chocolate recipe needs:

- Ingredients you generally have in the house
- Forgiving measurements
- It begs to be eaten cold the next day.

It's got me through some hard times.

Before I left home at 17 to start uni, I scoured my mother's recipes to fill a book with scrawled instructions to ward of starvation. In twenty-twelve fashion I'm now going to post the recipe here so it will be easier to find on my iPad when I want to cook it.

Plus, then you can cook it too. And you really should.

Emergency chocolate pudding

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons cococa
3/4 white sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup brown sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa (additional)
2 1/2 cups boiling water

1. Preheat over to 180 degrees celsius

2. Mix flour, baking powder, cocoa (2 tbsp) and white sugar.

Learning to make this as a lazy, hungry uni student I developed bad baking habits. Namely, I mix the ingredients in the same dish I am going to bake the pudding in to minimise the washing up. I wouldn't think of doing this with any other recipe now but I still do it here.

3. Add milk and melted butter to dry ingredients and mix to make a batter.

4. Mix brown sugar and extra coccoa together in a separate bowl (sadly I never found a way to avoid dirtying another bowl for this step) and sprinkle over the batter.

5. Use the back of a dessert spoon and pour boiling water (or just hot water from your tap if you are lazy) over the dish.

It will look like a dirty mud puddle. Do not be discouraged.

6. Bake for 45 minutes or thereabouts.

This is what you will get. An island of fluffy chocolate cake with a crispy top, floating on a bubbling lava bed of thick chocolate sauce. Don't worry about those blackened burnt looking bits on the top. They are extra crispy and delicious.

Eat it with cream, or ice cream. Or just a glass of milk.

And I wasn't kidding about the cold the next day thing. Sometimes I make it with this in mind.