Originally published in the Clifton Courier, March 14, 2018

A recipe for disaster, in 34 steps.

Step 1: Plan to make the most of a drizzly afternoon by leaving work on time, having a cup of tea, maybe doing a light ab workout and doing a bit of reading before an early bedtime.

Step 2: Remember a conversation you had with someone at work about their birthday being the next day and how much they love sticky date pudding.

Step 3: Decide to attempt to appear as a caring person, forecasting a lovely rainy afternoon baking pudding. Tell yourself it will be fun, won’t take long and will fill the apartment with a delightful caramel aroma.

Step 4: Look up a recipe on Google and tell yourself “this should be easy enough”.

Step 5: Go to the fancy, pretentious grocery store near your house for baking supplies. Wander fruitlessly until finally giving in and asking the shop assistant “where would I find the dates?”

Step 6: Be grateful the shop assistant wasn’t a sassy sitcom character who took the opportunity to make a quip about your romantic prospects.

Step 7: Be outraged by how bloody exxy medjool dates are.

Step 8: Check out the price of prunes and decide to pioneer the Sticky Prune Pudding.

Step 9: Tell yourself you’re certain you’ve read something about prunes having less calories than meedjool dates.

Step 10: Decide to keep your work clothes on because being in semi-professional attire will put you in a professional frame of mind and stop you from licking bowls and tasting mixture by the tablespoon.

Step 11: Cream brown sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs together in a food processor.

Step 12: Tell yourself to live in the moment and sneak a taste of the smooth, fudgy mix you’ve created, ignoring the fact that this artery-clogging goo is just butter, sugar and raw eggs and that you sometimes have dignity.

Step 13: Marvel at the soothing novelty of sifting flour.

Step 14: Mix everything in together and then pour into a cake tin with one of those silicone bowl scrapers, silently praising the noble sprit who invented these mixture-saving miracle sticks.

Step 15: Put the pre-cake goo into the oven.

Step 16: Prepare the caramel sauce ingredients, deciding once again to live in the moment by licking the thickened cream from the tub.

Step 17: Curse yourself for who you’ve become.

Step 18: Catch a glimpse of a spark flying around the oven out of the corner of your eye.

Step 19: Open the oven to discover more sparks coming from the inner mechanisms of the oven, hastily turn that bastard off.

Step 20: Realise your kitchen and building could have burned down because of a pudding.

Step 21: Realise you have 1.5 litres of raw prune pudding mix in your custody.

Step 22: Consider turning up to work with said raw mixture in a milk bottle for the colleague’s birthday.

Step 23: Decide to cook the raw mixture like pancakes on the sandwich press.

Step 24: Continue making the caramel sauce, frequently tasting the sinful liquid.

Step 25: Try to ignore how much caramel sauce you “tasted” to “ensure quality”.

Step 26: Scoop raw pudding mixture out of cake tin, dolloping on sandwich press until it looks like it’s been cooked all the way through.

Step 27: Repeat this process for 40 minutes, complaining to your housemate the whole time.

Step 28: Realise that, with the pudding mix, the caramel sauce and the greasing of the hotplate, you’ve used half a kilo of butter in this desert.

Step 29: Calculate an estimation of how much butter you’ve personally consumed.

Step 30: Hope to the heavens the prune power kicks in soon.

Step 31: Pile the pudding pancakes on top of each other with a drizzle of caramel sauce between each layer in a bid to ensure some semblance of structural integrity.

Step 32: Name your creation a Sticky Prune Pudding Pancake Stack.

Step 33: Take a second look at your cakey abomination and realise you’ve spent three hours of your live making a caramel cow pat.

Step 34: Decide to never do something nice for anyone ever again.