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.