Founding member leaves Pudding Club

Pudding Club convened last weekend. Pudding Club started a few years ago as a bake-off among friends, and was so much fun we decided to make a fixture of it.

Typically, two teams compete in making the same pudding but from different recipes: lemon-meringue pies, chocolate mousses, upside-down cakes, sweet scones, et cetera. (For the record, Edmonds Cookery Book beat Cuisine magazine on the filling front, when we did lemon-meringue pies.)

Last autumn, we did "foraged puddings", where each team could make any pudding as long as the main ingredients were gathered in the wild. Apples, blackberries and walnuts were central to the pie and sundaes that resulted.

Curiously, we often end up using vegetables in the puddings: one of the chocolate mousse recipes called for avocado, an upside-down cake required kumara, and the scones made were potato scones and pumpkin scones.

It is arguable whether a scone is a pudding, but we did apply cream and jam.

Pudding Club nights are always playful, and sometimes we wear costumes. Reindeer made the chocolate mousses, and last weekend we were vampires.

The ingredients for the concoction were orange and lemon zest, vodka (bought after politely waking a slumbering liquor-store attendant), bay leaves, thyme, pine needles and pine resin.

I know, right? They don't sound enticing ingredients for a pudding, but that is because we had decided to make deodorant instead of dessert.

Aware this sort of herb-based activity could once have seen us burned, hanged, or tortured to death for being witches, we took advantage of our modern liberty by making a proper ritual of it.

"Old, old," said pudding clubber Katrina, rummaging through the host's cupboards to try to find vessels and utensils that looked the part. Out came pottery goblets, wooden chopping boards, a stone mortar and pestle, and a big old cleaver. Also a Pyrex measuring jug with the metric units printed on it in red, but nevermind.

We lit candles, partly in solidarity with the vigils that were under way for the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen, but mostly just to create a witchy mood with ominous shadows.

Everyone took turns at pestling the pine resin into a powder. We worked as a group rather than competing, this time. The orange and the lemon were zested, the pine needles, thyme and bay leaves cleavered.

It felt nice and old-fashioned, but it was also simply as-seen-on-TV. The recipe came from TV One's Grow Your Own Drugs.

The conversation, as we made the deodorant, ranged from the way muffins are becoming more and more like cakes, to that large hadron collider they're running in Switzerland.

Pudding clubber Kimberley had asked a physics teacher to explain what was the Higgs boson the boffins operating the collider were trying to find.

"I could see his brain thinking, 'OK . . . How do I dumb this down enough?'" pudding clubber Kimberley said.

Pudding clubber Amy produced six small glass bottles she had found at the tip. "I knew they would come in useful for something, but I didn't know what."

They were the perfect size for deodorant, and the right number for those assembled.

We made labels for the little bottles, on brown paper. They said, "The arms, Pitt salve, TPCVC."

TPCVC stood for The Pudding Club Vampire Coven. We drew bloody fangs on them.

It was pudding clubber Amy's last club meet, before she moves to Australia. At the very first Pudding Club, she fashioned lemon badges and chefs' hats out of paper for the making of lemon-meringue pie, so starting the costume tradition.

It is not yet clear whether Pudding Club can survive without her exuberance and creativity. Still, she enjoyed her deodorant-making sendoff.

"Best. Pudding. Club. Ever," she said.