Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 160°C/140°C fan/325°F.
2. In a small saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, bring the amaranth, water and salt to a soft boil. This means a gentle putter rather than a violent bubble that will blow the lid off and scare the bejaysus out of your budgie. Cook for 15 minutes, until the water is fully absorbed. Amaranth is not a dry, fluffy grain when cooked. Expect something that looks like a gluey couscous.
3. While the amaranth is doing its thing, prep the rest of the gear. Blend the maple syrup and nut butter together until smooth, then add the eggs. Pour this mixture into the milk and add the chopped bananas, raisins and vanilla. Remove the amaranth from the heat, stir briskly and add in the milky mixture. Give it all a gentle stir.
4. Pour and scrape the pudding mix into a mediumsized pie dish (about the size of a magazine page). You’re aiming for a pudding at least 1 inch deep, but no more than 2 inches. Pyrex rectangular glass dishes give the best result for custardy puds like this one. Cook for 40 minutes in a conventional oven. It should wobble slightly in the centre when removed. Halfway through cooking, mix the rapadura sugar and cinnamon together and sprinkle it on top
5. TIP: Amaranth is another one of those super grains. It has serious nutritional gravitas, rivalling quinoa as the number one seed. Amaranth’s got more muscle than wheat, clocking in four times the amount of calcium and twice as much iron. And with generous stores of lysine, you can kiss cold sores toodle-loo. Not bad for half a cent per gram. A caveat for the cook: bananas used in this recipe need to be over-ripe. Any green areas on the banana skin means they have not ripened fully and will make the pudding bitter. Look for older bananas with blackened sweet spots. Please don’t try this recipe with coconut milk or almond milk. Something offensive happens.