Daring Bakers April Challenge -- Traditional English Pudding

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Well, I wasn't going to do this challenge this month, it seemed complicated and my life has been so busy lately that I didn't want to stress about doing something I love to do.  But, when the last weekend before the reveal was coming up and I actually had some time, I decided at the last minute to do it.  Because of my last minute decision though I opted not to search for suet and I used lard instead.  Also, Al's been doing really good about staying allergen free, so I replaced the flour with a mixture of alternate flours and I decided to go savory instead of sweet and make dinner out of the challenge.  I decided to do the traditional steak and kidney pudding but altered it to be a steak and onion pudding. But maybe I should have taken a pass this month because my pudding failed miserably!!

Here is my rig as I pulled it out of the oven.

 And after 5 hours of steaming this muddy mess is what I got.

We scooped out the inside to try and salvage some of it, but it was not very tasty at all.   Maybe my bowl was too big, my dough too watery or maybe I caused an issue with substituting the flour.  Maybe I'll try it again.