MAKE YOUR OWN CHRISTMAS PUDDING

Ho ho and a welcome to Steve's Kitchen,
it's that time of the year when I love to make a homemade figgy pudding, plum
pudding, Christmas pudding, whatever you like to call it. I call it
just delicious and making your own at home you just can't beat it. If you've
never had Christmas pudding before think of fruitcake on steroids, I mean this is
a pudding Bowl, this is what we're going to be baking it in and that is just the
start of the fruit we're putting in there. You've got your lovely sun-dried
raisins in there, currants, there's some candied peel which is really essential
and glace cherries but we don't just stop there with your dried fruit, I've
got a whole cup full of dried dates which I've just chopped up.

You can use
figs of course the dried fruits are up to your imagination cranberries, apricots,
anything will do, overall you're looking for about a pound or half a kilo of
dried fruits, plus the dates. We always start our Christmas pudding by
rehydrating our fruits, so I'll pop them into a bowl and the dates go in there as
well. Now we're going to add in a couple of tablespoons of gorgeous molasses,
you can add treacle in there of course, blackstrap molasses is really good, a
dark stout, I'm using Guinness try and get a local stout if you can and we're
going to put a cup of that in there. I.

Always then add in a really big glug of
brandy as well. I haven't got any brandy with me at the moment so a really nice
sherry works just as well. Lastly we're just going to take a lemon and we're
going to take the zest off of this lemon and grate it in with our fruit, just to
add some fresh zestiness into it and an orange too. We're just going to take the
zest off of a large orange.

Now give that a good stir through, we're just going to
leave this out on the side for at least eight hours or overnight so it absorbs
all that beautiful moisture and plumps up and then we can get on and make the
second half of the recipe. So I've left that overnight just come and take a look
how beautiful the fruit is, all those gorgeous fruit now have plumped up,
they've absorbed all that wonderful juice. An alternative by the way of using
alcohol would be to use the juice from the orange and the lemon
in here to let that plump up the fruit instead. So now it's time to turn this
fruit into a Christmas pudding, we've got a hundred grams, three and a half ounces
of soft compacted brown sugar , 100 grams, three and a half ounces of bread crumbs
and that's just to bulk up the pudding.

Next that lovely suet, we've got a
hundred grams again, three and a half ounces of suet and this really adds the
flavor that we recognize in a traditional Christmas pudding. To help
bind the whole thing together this time we've just got 60 grams, that's 2 ounces
of all-purpose or plain flour. To add a rich and bitter darkness I'm adding a
couple of tablespoons of dark cocoa. Now for sure used dried ginger, I love fresh
ginger in my Christmas pudding so I'm just going to grate in about half a
teaspoon or the equivalent of fresh ginger.

Add in a couple of teaspoons of
mixed spice and half a teaspoon extra of cinnamon. We are going to put this fresh
granny smith apple in there now if you can get a cooking apple like a Bramley
go for it and I just like to grate the Apple up add the grated apple in with
all the seasoning and spices and lastly also to help bind the pudding together
we're going to add in two eggs and now we're going to mix all these ingredients
together to get a beautiful Christmas pudding mix. Now you do want to mix this
until you get a lovely even mixture, I. Have a 1.2 Liter pudding Bowl here,
that's about two and a half US pints and what we want to do is to pack our
pudding mixture into the bowl.

Now you can tell I've done this a lot, that fits
in there just about perfectly. Now I'm just going to tap my pudding down to get
any air bubbles out of it, next take a piece of baking paper fold it over and
then fold it again and just continue to fold this over until you get a decent
point like that. Hold the pointy end to the center of the pudding and then just
cut yourself a round like that and we create ourselves a beautiful little
circle of paper, just to pop on top of the pudding. Next take a big piece of
baking foil and what I want you to do is just fold a pleat in the center of the
foil and this is just to allow the pudding to expand a
little bit as it cooks.

So we get the pleat in the center and then tightly
fold this over the top of the pudding basin. Now get a nice tight seal around
the foil, you could use a bit of string around here. A lot of you know from
previous Steve's kitchens Christmas puddings, I cook these normally in a
pressure cooker which does save a lot of time. We haven't got our pressure cooker
on this part of our world tour so we're going to do it a much simpler way.

Get
yourself a nice deep baking tray and you're either going to use an upturned
saucer or I've got a little trivet here, pop it in the bottom, we're going to pop
our pudding Bowl onto the trivet and that's just to keep it off of the direct
heat of the oven and then we want to fill our tray with water and the reason
we want a fairly deep tray is because we want it to come at least an inch up the
side of the pudding basin. The next thing I'm going to do is actually tent this
over with some more foil, so what I've done here is I've made a little tent
over the top of my pudding to keep the steam in, if you had a nice big clay pot
with a big lid you could do that but you'd need to seal around the join of
the pot just to keep the steam inside. We're going to be cooking this on a
fairly modest heat, I've got an oven preheated to 110 degrees Celsius that's
220 Fahrenheit and we're going to cook this for about three-and-a-half to four
hours. Now you might want to check the water level about halfway and just top
it up if it needs it, be careful the water will be super hot and if you're
preferring the idea of doing this in a pressure cooker just google steve's
kitchen christmas pudding and you can see my previous recipe where I used the
pressure cooker with all the instructions for that.

Okay carefully I'm
bringing this out of the oven, now you can see how the Christmas pudding is
domed there, its pushed the top up. The house smells divine.
Now I didn't need to top this up at all with water through the whole cook, so if
you get a good seal on there you should have the same results, definitely be a
little careful when you take off the foil because steam is going to come out
but you can see the pudding is intact, the water is still almost as high as it
was when I started and you'd expect it to dome like that. That is pretty much it,
I'm going to let that cool down completely and you can store this in the
pantry and don't forget you can keep this all the way through to
next year just in a pantry, it will last but we're not going to be, we're going to be
eating this on Christmas. Come Christmas Day you can re steam this for about an hour
and get that beautiful smell of Christmas pudding filling the house
again or you can just heat it in the microwave for about five or ten minutes,
just to warm it through.

Whatever you decide to do just enjoy and have a great
Christmas. Now I've got a video on my channel showing how to flame the
Christmas pudding if you're interested in that check it out. I really hope
you've enjoyed and joined me making Christmas pudding this year, if you have
send me across some pictures on any social media you like, be good and I will see
you very shortly for another fantastic episode of Steve's kitchen,
take care..