Christmas Pudding

I know everyone has their opinion on Christmas pudding, but my family is British and it’s something we traditionally have as one of our Christmas desserts.   Christmas pudding is mostly made up of a variety of raisins, apples, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves and Brandy and you steam it in a bowl for 8 hours before you store it.  It is traditionally made with suet, but I use butter.  This is my Granny’s recipe and I think it’s perfect.  I use a food processor which makes the job so much easier than my Granny having to grate all the apples by hand.  I use my Grandmother’s 60 year old scale to measure the ingredients and it really connects me to wonderful memories of her baking.  You need to make this at least a month ahead and allow it to rest in a cool, dark cupboard for all the flavors to really meld together before you steam it again for 2 hours on Christmas day.  After dinner, we have a tradition of popping the Christmas crackers.  They are decorated cardboard tubes with twists of paper at the end and you cross arms around the table and pull on the ends.  There is a pop from a small amount of cap gun like chemical that is on the end (sounds like a very dangerous tradition but we haven’t lost a finger yet!) and inside the crackers are a colorful paper crown, a bad joke, and a little toy or plastic puzzle.  We sit around the table with our goofy hats, read the silly jokes and fight over who has the best toy.  It wouldn’t be Christmas without Christmas crackers and I am glad you can find them in the States these days.  Then we have dessert and you serve the Christmas pudding with great fanfare by heating up some brandy, pouring it over the pudding, lighting it, dimming the lights and bringing it to the table so everyone can see the spectacle.  The flames die out quickly so it isn’t a huge bonfire!  My family always serves this with hard sauce, which is basically a buttercream frosting with brandy, and we love to pour warm custard over the whole thing.  Click here for the recipe….