The Dessert Princes William And Harry Ate 'Every Weekend' Features A Store-Bought Ingredient

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It's always poignant to hear about princes William and Harry growing up in Buckingham Palace. Not only were they living in a proverbial fishbowl, but their parents didn't get along, and their mother died while they were still young. Even so, they experienced many enjoyable childhood moments, not a few of them due to the kitchen wizardry of palace chef Darren McGrady. His 2007 cookbook entitled "Eating Royally: Recipes and Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen" shares a recipe for a dessert called Queen of Puddings that the two boys loved so much that they wanted to eat it every weekend when they were home from boarding school.

The recipe may have originated in the 1600s and at first went by the names Monmouth or Manchester pudding. The current moniker likely dates to Victorian times, since it's thought that the pudding, like royal icing, could have been renamed in honor of Queen Victoria. Of course, the "queen" sobriquet might also refer to how fancy the pudding is. The 1907 edition of "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management" refers to it as "queen of bread puddings" to set it apart from the plainer bread pudding recipes also included in the cookbook.

McGrady's recipe is actually quite simple. It's also less expensive than you might expect from something served up in a castle, since it's made with ordinary supermarket ingredients. He eschews the traditional breadcrumbs, instead starting with store-bought Sarah Lee pound cake soaked in custard made from eggs, sugar, vanilla paste, and milk. The pudding is then covered with strawberry jelly and topped with a meringue made of egg whites and more sugar, while sliced almonds serve as a garnish.

In addition to using a store-bought shortcut, Darren McGrady's recipe for Queen of Puddings is relatively affordable for a royal dessert. If you needed to purchase all of the ingredients to make Darren McGrady's Queen of Puddings, you'd probably pay $7.19 for the Sara Lee pound cake. The vanilla paste would run you $8.99, while a dozen eggs might cost $2.99. You'd pay another $2.59 for a gallon of whole milk and $3.39 for a four-pound bag of sugar, while you could get an 18-ounce jar of Kroger strawberry preserves for $2.59. For $3.49, you could pick up a four-ounce bag of sliced almonds, bringing the total cost for this dessert to $31.23. That might seem pretty pricey for a pudding, even one with a royal pedigree, but once you take into account the fact that you'll have leftovers of every ingredient but the cake, it's really not so bad.

Of course, you can always make an even cheaper Queen of Puddings. It shouldn't be too hard to bake your own pound cake, since a basic pound cake recipe only calls for sugar, flour, butter, salt, and eggs. A cake mix would also be less expensive than a Sara Lee pound cake — Duncan Hines classic yellow cake mix only costs $1.49 at the time of writing. Another option is to return the pudding to its roots by using leftover bread instead of cake (both Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood make Queen of Puddings this way). It's also possible to save a few bucks by swapping out the vanilla paste for vanilla extract as Pick 'n Save sells a two-ounce bottle of the latter for $5.99.