Sticky toffee pudding is one of The Black Sheep’s most popular menu offerings. The restaurant’s signature dessert has been featured in news articles, depicted on the covers of magazines and even garnered a $10,000 offer for the secret recipe – a proposition Steve and Ellen Gedra, The Black Sheep’s owners and chefs, declined without pause.
This dessert is often undersold on menus as a date cake served with warm caramel sauce...which isn’t inaccurate. But made with a careful and skilled hand, like Ellen’s, it is also so much more.
It’s uncertain how Ellen’s version of the cake retains its shape in its serving vessel and yet promptly collapses into a velvety warm pool the minute it hits your mouth. Saturated with sumptuous toffee caramel sauce, its salty notes and accompanying whipped cream keep the luxurious mélange from being overly rich, delivering peaks and valleys of both flavor and temperature.
Decadent, yet not overly rich, The Black Sheep’s confidential iteration of this recipe trounces those easily found on the internet. The difference is found in its complexity and deft balance, which work together to serve an intensity more satisfying than overbearing.
Sticky Toffee Pudding is incredibly popular in the UK, so much so that it’s been unofficially embraced as one of Britain’s national desserts. This is surely due to the fact that it is incredibly delicious, but also perhaps the inclusion of the word pudding in its name, a noun used to describe the country’s overly full category of steamed and boiled desserts. However several food historians believe STP was born in Canada sometime in the middle of the last century; a somewhat egregious, though scrumptious, response to the thrift war rationing required. Post-war, STP celebrates formerly scarce ingredients: heaps of quality butter, sugar and the dish’s main device, Medjool dates.
While we can’t share the mysterious recipe for this particularly spectacular sticky toffee pudding, we can highly recommend that you get to The Black Sheep and order one (or two – we won’t judge).
Pre-order a pan of STP for a party of 40 at home. Treat yourself to one on a rainy night at the restaurant’s bar paired with a rye Old Fashioned or tawny port. Score a dish to share with your BFF at brunch. Or order a round for the table after a lovely dinner with friends.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and we promise you’ll find that any effort required, large or small, to attain your own Sticky Toffee Pudding from The Black Sheep will be worth it.
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