1. Spotted dick.
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It's dry, flavourless, and dotted through with raisins. Spotted dicks, both in and out of the kitchen, should always be avoided.
2. Jam roly-poly.
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Generations have spent their school lunchtimes swerving cloying suet rolls served in skin-thick custard. Just look at that lovely, watery, greasy liquid it's swimming in.
3. Eton mess.
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This looks like someone lost their shit and overturned a table at the local village fete, ruining someone's lovely puddings. Instead of just binning it, someone's gathered it off the dirty floor and served it anyway. Waste not want not.
4. Banoffee pie.
Who in their right mind would ruin a caramel pudding with horrible bananas? BRITAIN. THAT'S WHO.
5. Semolina pudding.
These gloopy yet gritty piles of sludge taste like creamy sand. While that may have been acceptable back in the '50s, it's almost inedible by today's standards.
6. Lardy cake.
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Because any cake that has ACTUAL PIG FAT as its main ingredient is a bad cake.
7. Trifle.
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Everyone has ~that~ aunt who insists on making a trifle at Christmas – mainly to satiate her own brandy thirst. Drowning what is essentially a 6-year-old's pudding in strong spirits is not cool. Not cool at all.
8. Christmas pudding.
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Christmas in Britain is a special kind of dessert hell because this is when the dried fruits come out. Sometimes, a Christmas pudding mix can be festering for a WHOLE YEAR before it's cooked.
9. Christmas cake.
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The same goes for Christmas cake which is, on the whole, drier but equally as dubious as Xmas pudding and raisin-laden. At least most people have the courtesy to cover it in icing.
10. Eccles cakes.
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And just in case you didn't get that British desserts rely rather heavily on raisins, here's another example of a fat-laden snack which is just sultana station.
11. Syllabub.
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Innocent pots of milk are curdled with wine or cider...which makes it taste a bit like rotten cream.
12. Bread and butter pudding.
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Fortunately rationing ended over 60 years ago. Bread and butter is not a luxury, people – even if you put sultanas and custard on it.
13. Rice pudding.
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This is the closest thing to partially digested baby sick you can get.
14. Carrot cake.
Do carrots belong in a cake? Or do they, as God intended, belong in a salad?
15. Madeira cake.
There is absolutely nothing joyous or right about a cake as dull as a Madeira cake. It is disappointment in a tin.
16. Sussex pond pudding.
From the outside, it looks like a delicious steak pudding and then you cut it to find a ton of lemon and orange peels. Absolutely nothing about this hollow shell of a pudding sounds, looks, or tastes good.
17. Wet Nelly.
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Specific to our friends in Liverpool, this is a variation on the bread and butter pudding where an entire loaf of bread is soaked in milk overnight before eggs and sugar are thrown over the mush and it's baked. Again, something that definitely should have been left in the past.
18. Clootie dumpling.
The clootie is the pudding version of a haggis. Need we say more?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need GBBO so badly.
Mary, pray for us. 🙏
