First up, on my great plan to cook christmas dinner for 12 people was to make a christmas pudding. I love xmas pud, so I was keen to have this as my dessert. I wanted to do something a bit different though, and so a plan came together to make 12 individual puds, that could be individually covered in brandy and lit.

In terms of creating the mixture, there’s no practical difference between making 1 or 12 puddings. I found a recipe from Gordon on BBC Good Food, and set about tweaking it to my needs. His recipe actually allowed for 8 individual puddings of 250ml. 250ml, however, is a fairly large pudding after a whole roast turkey with all requisite trimmings. Plus, I don’t have 12 pudding basins. Bugger.

Gü then to the rescue. The irritating thing about some Gü desserts is that they come in glass ramekins, and it always seems such a waste to throw them out. So you end up keeping them. And you end up with about 20 glass ramekins. This is handy, however, if you want to make 12 xmas puddings. A quick bit of (probably shoddy) maths suggested that the volume of a Gü ramekin is about 115ml. Gordon’s recipe made 2l. A quick bit of scaling down to ~ 1.5l, and I had my recipe.

The great thing about making xmas pud is that it’s actually remarkably trivial. You get a boatload of dried fruit, toss it in a bowl with some shredded beef fat (suet) and stir. Then I simply greased the ramekins with margarine and spooned the mixture in. I ended up with enough for about 2 more ramekins worth, but happened to have 1 small pudding basin which took the remainder of the mixture. I stuck to the recipe fairly well, but added a couple of shots of brandy into the mix, and used the whole of my cooking apple, rather than waste the rest. The recipe also didn’t specify what type of Guinness to use, so I went with Guinness Original. Unfortunately, there was too much in the bottle for the recipe. Shame.

BBC Good Food handily included a link on the recipe page on how to steam puddings. So I pleated, wrapped and tied my 13 puddings. Of course, 1 pudding fits quite well into a saucepan; they’re both round. 12 fit less well. Fortunately, I’d twigged this earlier on, and bought a 38x29cm roasting tin with grid from Sainsbury’s, which were conveniently on offer. Puds in, water boiling, tin-foil lid, and the steaming was underway. Steaming’s pretty simple too; just top up the water every half hour or so for the next 4 hours.

I removed the puddings with a pair of tongs, and decided that it was imperative to test my creation. So I did. And, I have to say, it was pretty good. Here’s to hoping my guests think so :-S

I stored the puds just on a shelf in my kitchen. As it was only a week, this seemed to be fine.

A week later, on the day itself, I re-steamed for another hour to heat them back up. To remove from the ramekin took a slight knack, but once I’d done the first 2, the rest followed in short order. A flexible knife run round the outside of the pudding soon made them drop out easily. Once on the plate, they were dusted with icing sugar though a sieve and topped with a couple of holly leaves. Oh, and served with an individual measure of brandy and a match. And some brandy cream. MmmMmMmMMm.

Top tip; small puds don’t need too much brandy for ignition, or they burn for hours. Also, remind your guests to remove the holly before lighting!

Check out more photos in the album, there’s a sample of them below.