Christmas Pudding in practise

I stuck mainly to the recipe. the main divergence was I noticed there was no suet in the recipe, and I had deliberately gone out and bought a pack of dried vegtable suet for the sole purpose of making the pudding. So I put suet in. I substituated it for 1/2 the margarine.

Of course this meant that my liquid to dry ingredients was now wrong, so I had to add a bit more liquid. This was made up of extra stout, and whiskey until the pudding looked as moist as I expected it to. (which of course could be completely wrong).

My mother had leant me a pudding bowl, but the mixture wouldn't fit in so I created 1 large, and 2 small puddings.  [I only realise now as I type this in that I have the sizes  all wrong. I have 1 extra large pudding, and 2 small puddings].

At this stage the pudding tasted really good. The lemon and orange have given it a great tang. Hopefully that stays with the final version.

Boiling of the puddings now was more difficult. In these globally warmed times, I considered it far too wasteful to have 2/3 pots of water boiling simulataneously, so I came up with the genius idea of using my frying pan which was wide enough... just.. to house all 3 bowls. Of course the pan is only about 1 1/2 inches high, so I could only get that much water in,  but the recipe didn't really say how high  water in the pot should be. I figured the stream created as the lower part of the pudding heats would rise and cook the rest of the pudding.

So my 3 puddings are now done.  Probably still a bit moist. I'll leave them that way to mature for a bit. Considering I made these on Dec 14 they won't be maturing the minimum 6 weeks though. The plan is to try one of the smaller ones this week, and I'll see if the large one is fuly cooked.