Christmas Pudding (Revised Recipe)

I posted my traditional Christmas pud recipe a year or two ago, but I've slightly revised a few of the ingredients. I rather like Nigella's recipe, so I've added some prunes to the mix, so it really can be called a plum pudding, but I can't be paying twenty odd quid for the Pedro Ximenes sherry, so I will stick with my mix of any sweetish sherry that's in the cupboard, and some  dark flavourful beer for the liquid part.

And speaking of beer, I seem to have struck up something of a passing relationship with my local brewery here in Gloucester, called, naturally enough, Gloucester Brewery. They have kindly allowed me to pick up an occasional bag of their spent brewery grains which my cows pigs and chickens absolutely love, and whilst I'm doing that, I get to pop in and have a look around their newly revamped shop on Gloucester Quays. It's in one of the many wonderful old buildings on the quay, and has been done up very sensitively and in keeping with the old vaults. It must have cost quite a bit, and the work has been going on for some time now, but the end result is really good. I generally take them in a few of my free range eggs in return for the spent grains, which I hope they like. So today finding myself in need of the aforementioned dark full flavoured beer, I bought a bottle of this Dockside Dark
with (it says on the label) "coffee chocolate and subtle sweetness". It's just perfect for Christmas pudding, so I might make an extra one for the guys down there as a small thank you. Mind you, I'm not sure how pleased they'll be - although I love it, I know that traditional Christmas pudding isn't everyone's thing. Still it's the thought that counts!

About a pound/450 grams of mixed dried fruit, about half currants and the rest sultanas and finely chopped ready to eat prunes.
Zest and juice of 1 lemon and 1 orange
1 teaspoon of mixed spice
half a teaspoon of cinnamon and nutmeg
6 ounces/150 grams of dark brown muscovado sugar
1 tablespoon of black treacle
a glug of rum or brandy

4 ounces/100 grams fresh white breadcrumbs
2 ounces/50 gr ground almonds
3 ounces75 gr plain flour
6 ounces/100 gr shredded suet
Around half a pint/250ml of sweetish sherry and dark beer such as Dockside Dark 50:50 mix
3 eggs
1 medium cooking apple such as Bramley, grated, I never bother peeling but you can if you like.

Soak the dried fruits in the sherry and beer mix overnight or longer. Add all the other ingredients and stir well.Everyone in the family should get to have a stir, and make a wish.
 Add your family heirloom charms or coins cleaned with an overnight vinegar soak. Turn into a large pudding basin or two smaller ones.. Cover and steam for at least six hours. Allow to cool and store until Christmas day when you will need to steam again for a couple of hours. Or if you're pushed for hob space on the day just use the microwave to reheat for  a couple of minutes or so when you're ready.

Change of Address

I've changed my address. I no longer live at Carters Barn in the lovely Wiltshire countryside. I now reside at twenty seven Catastrophe Mansions, Disaster Avenue, Slough of Despond, Hades.

There's a rule of life that says If Something Can Go Wrong, It Will.  So if a fire is going to break out, it will do so a week before Christmas when your rellies are about to arrive, and your decorations are just going up.

I also find that one never looks one's best when a burly fireman is bursting through the front door, hose in hand. I love a man in uniform as I think I've said before, and yet when you should be wearing your best Nigella style black satin dressing gown, floating back elegantly from the kitchen, wodge of chocolate cake in hand, you find yourself in fact wearing your slightly shrunk in the wash cotton nightie, a pair of wellies, and a dog walking coat that's let's face it has seen better days. No make up and a hair style reminiscent of Bill Clinton's worst excesses, where the hair appears to be growing at an angle perpendicular to the head. I'd jumped out of bed and grabbed the first thing to hand before dialling 999. And thank goodness for the Swindon Fire Brigade, and the Cricklade Retained Fire Service. Lovely men, fantastic service. Could not have asked for more. Thanks guys.

I can see the funny side of this now, but only because no one was hurt, thank goodness, when an ember set fire to a log basket in the early hours, and I know that the damage can all be put right. The man from NFU was quick and helpful, and we just have to find a carpet fitter, a decorator, and a builder who can restore us to some normality this side of Christmas. "Stuff" is all replaceable. The only thing I was really upset about was a little thing that's not reallly replaceable

My children made a set of partridges/doves/calling birds(not quite sure which)  many years ago from card and tinsel, following instructions from  Blue Peter, and I have brought them out every Christmas since. So I was particularly sad to see that they had gone in the fire, all but this little charred remain. But I will continue to treasure this single  little partridge/dove/calling bird with it's singed tail as a reminder of good fortune, and wait until my grandchildren are old enough to make me another set. Things could have been a lot, lot worse. So maybe it's not quite Catastrophe Mansions, maybe it's more like twenty seven Lucky Lane, Therebut-Forfortune, Wiltshire.

Black satin on the Christmas list maybe?

PS Please check your smoke alarm batteries, they could save your life.

Kathy's Homemade Christmas

If you're a fan of homemade stuff in general Kirsty's TV series on how to make things yourself will come as no surprise to you, and pretty, homespun and folksy as it may be, lots of us have been doing things like this for years. But it is good to see these easy tideas brought to a wider audience. At least now you don't have to apologize for it, and since it's now vaguely fashionable to have home made stuff around the place, you can even give it to people as presents, and they might even be pleased to get your home produced jar or preserves, or hand knitted scarf, or whatever. The older ones among us may remember the wonderful  Joyce Grenfell's monologue "Useful and Acceptable Gifts" where a lady from the WI lectures on the acceptability of some truly terrible home made items. Crinoline ladies astride the spare loo roll, spring to mind. It was very funny,but it's probably a sign of the times nowadays when people are so time poor, and many of us just collapse on the sofa in front of the tv in the evenings when in times past we might have amused ourselves with a bit of knitting, sewing or craftwork.

All of which brings me to the point - salt dough. Many people think of this as cheap play dough for children but there's no need to relegate this cheap and cheerful stuff to the children's playgroup, although children will love doing it with you. Salt dough is quick and easy and can be made into durable and attractive decorations for Christmas.  Now I really do sound like Joyce Grenfell.

Just mix one cup of salt to each two cups of plain flour, and add about one cup of water to make a dough. Don't use expensive sea salt here, you want the cheapest bag on the supermarket shelf for this. Knead it to a smooth dough and roll out and cut using appropriately Christmassy cutters, remembering to make a small hanging hole at the top.

Bake the decorations in a very cool oven for several hours until dry and hard. The bottom oven of the Aga is ideal or around 200 degrees F.When completely dry allow to cool and paint and decorate as you wish. You can use any kind of paint you like, I happened to find an old tin of red gloss paint at the back of the garage which worked well, but it's a good idea to cover the finished item with a waterproof varnish of some kind, so that your ornaments will keep from year to year.

And remember you can always embarrass your children in years to come by lovingly bringiing out the creations they made when they were three.

Decorate your  items in seasonal colours, glitter, and tie with raffia or ribbons. A bit of gold or bronze paint rubbed on gives a suitably distressed effect if that's what you like. Or you can go for the neat and tidy like the one at the top of the page.

I've made a job lot this year, as we have the village hall to decorate, and can't afford to spend much money on it. So it's home made, homespun, and, to my eyes at least, even prettier.

Deck The Halls with Boughs of Cupressocyparis Leylandii..Fa-la-la-la la..

or how about "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana"? No, I know it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it does a lovely job of Decking the said Halls, all the same. You don't need to buy your Christmas greenery from a shop or garden centre.If you can manage to spare half an hour or so you can easily put together a lovely wreath for your front door from stuff you can usually find in your garden, or along a hedgerow, or a neighbour's garden. The ubiquitous Leylandii hedge will yield more than enough prunings to make a nice wreath for your front door as well as one for the neighbour in whose garden it's growing. And if you don't have your own shrubbery or hedge, you could always consider raiding the local supermarket car parks where there is often a good supply of shrubbery (far be it from me to lead you along the path of criminality),
Most instructions tell you to start with a base that you have to buy, but I never do. Just find yourself a good selection of reasonably bendy twiggy branches, things like willow, hazel, and more or less any wood produced during  the last summer  will be flexible enough to use. You will need a selection of sticks something like this

plus a roll of wire available from any garden centre, this on is sold as "Garden Wire Light Weight", and is the cheapest and is ideal.

and of course you will be armed with your trusty

secateurs.

Start by binding together your bare branches by winding the wire round and round, making a long "rope" of

flexible twigs.

Use plenty of wire for your first attempt as it will make life easier. When your twig rope is long enough bend it round into a rough circle  shape

and secure with your wire.

Snip off any protruding ends where the wood is too hard to bend and then  push in your branches of leylandii, holly, ivy or any other green stuff you can find, and wind on more wire to secure. Just keep going round and round with the wire and greenery until you're happy with the look. Something like this

I had a bit of trouble finding any red berries in my garden just now, since the birds have cleared up all the available supply, so I will probably get something in red plastic from the decorations box to finish the job, or I might just wire up a few cranberries for the finishing touch.

Fa-la-la-la-la Fa-la-la-laah!

Living In The Past

We were having a  conversation over a coffee, my daughter and I, and she said Ian was a fan of Jethro Tull, (that's Jethro Tull the pop group, not the 17th century agricultural engineer, although he might be a fan of him as well for all I know). I had no idea they were still going, (the group not the engineer, obviously) but I do remember their best hit from the sixties - it was called Living in the Past, and it's not only a good song, but has the unusual distinction of being written in 5/4 time, that is five beats to the bar. Almost everything in western music is written in variations of four or three time, and five time is quite unusual and distinctive. Not a lot of people know that. But why do I remember this obscure bit of information? It was in the sixties, and although nowadays, I frequently go upstairs and find myself wondering what I came up here for, it seems I still hve no difficulty remembering that Jethro Tull wrote a song in 5/4 time forty years ago. Humans brains are truly amazing,even mine.

Anyway Living in the Past makes a nice link to what I've been doing today, which is putting up the Christmas decorations, many of which are 30 or more years old. Obviously I hope I don't "live in the past", since that would be unhealthy and boring, but hanging up the decorations that your children made in primary school all those years ago is a lovely way of keeping a kind of family history. If you have small children do keep at least some of their efforts for the future. They will obviously go through a stage, usually in the early teens,  of being horrified and embarrassed at your displaying their childish efforts, but persevere, and eventually they will look back with you rather than just at you (in a horrified teenager kind of way) as the Blue Peter Red Hanging Bird Decorations come out yet again. The birds are made of red card with red tissue paper and tinsel for their wings and tails, and after nearly thirty Christmasses are a bit delicate, some might say tatty. There's always some discussion about what they are actually meant to be, turkeys, partridges, doves, or something else, who knows? Anyway, very Christmassy, very old, and very lovely don't you think?

Mince Pies

I've already given my  mincemeat recipe, and my favourite sweet shortcrust pastry recipe, so I'm not suggesting that you Dear Reader need any extra prattling on from me to just marry the two together to make the mince pies. Not at all. But I just thought I would give a recipe for a really luxurious sweet pastry that you could use, since let's face it, mince pies are a bit of a fiddle faddle, and you might as well gild the lily a bit if you're going to the trouble of making them. Mind you, from what I've encountered so far this year in the way of packet mince pies, you'd be better off donating them to the local cricket club for bowling practice than considering eating them. That's probably a bit unfair of me - you can get some quite nice mince pies if you shop around, but if you heard Delia on Woman's Hour on radio 4 in the week, she reckoned that home made mince pies cost about 9p each and decent bought ones anything from 30p to over a £1 each! And they still won't be as nice or as free from "stuff" as yours.

Luxury Sweet Shortcrust Pastry
8oz/250g flour
2oz/50g ground almonds
6oz/150g butter
2ox/50g caster or icing sugar
grated rind of 1 large or 2 small oranges
1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk

Put everything except the egg into the food processor and whizz to breadcrumb stage. At this stage I normally tip the mix out into a large bowl and add the egg by hand. This is because I have a Magimix processor that clumps the bottom layer into a, well a clump really, at the bottom of the bowl. If you have a processor with sloping sides it probably won't do that, but the point is you need to handle the dough as little as possible, and you certainly don't want to beat it to death with a Magimix blade. Anyway, beat the whole egg and yolk together and mix in quickly to form a smooth dough. This is a very rich dough and it's a good idea to rest it in the fridge for half an hour or so to firm up if you can.

Roll out and use to line bun tins in usual way, and fill with your lovely home made mincemeat. Should make a dozen and a half or more if you don't make them too big.

You'll notice from here that my mince pies are cooked in little bun cases. This is because my bun tin is a very ancient tinny thing, and I find the cases ensure that I can get the MPs out of the tin in quick order and onto the cooling rack so the tin's ready for the next lot (there's always a next lot), without having to hang about waiting for cooling down. Also any leaked mincemeat doesn't get so easily welded onto the tray. I might treat myself to a nice non stick one for next year.

In the interests of research my daughter Sarah is trying a frangipane topping on her mince pies, (she has a bit of an almond thing going on at the moment) and hopefully she will post a report on how she gets on with that and  the supply of mincemeat she took home with her this weekend, as it does sound rather delicious. And Claire down in Cornwall seems to be making MPs for the whole county, our little grandson can't be eating them all can he?

Mulled Wine

If you've ever been offered a glass of generic mulled wine at a pre Christmas bash, you will recognize the mouth puckering horrible-ness of the commercial product. I'm convinced most people say they don't like Mulled Wine because they've had the misfortune to be aquainted with the ready made stuff which Mr Supermarket makes with the cheapest rough old plonk, too rough probably to go in a bottle on its own, and whose taste is masked with tongue stripping artificial citrus and spice flavouring.

So get your own cheap plonk - nothing wrong with using an ordinary red wine for mulling, I used Tesco's Sicilian red wine,for our village do,  at around £3.30 a bottle it's full flavour makes an excellent mulled wine and is even ok for everyday vin ordinaire type drinking as long as you're not Jancis Robinson. Not the kind of stuff you'd want to offer your friends coming round for dinner, but still ok for Keith Floyd style casseroles (that's one for me and one for the pot, and then maybe another one for me). And a bottle of economy own brand dark rum. I know I seem to be always recomending economy options, - I make no apology for this, it's not that I'm mean you understand, I love a really good red wine, and will enjoy several over Christmas, but I don't believe in splashing out in a situation where most people just can't tell the difference. If you are Oz Clark, then go ahead and use your Chateau Lafitte Rothschild and your matured Jamaica Rum, but I really don't think the rest of us will mind.

Mulled Wine

1 bottle red wine

2-3fl oz / 50 -75ml dark rum

2 cinnamon sticks broken into pieces

10 allspice berries

10 cloves

1 star anise

about a half inch/1 cm of fresh grated ginger

a good grating of nutmeg

zest of half an orange and half a lemon (peeled off with a potato peeler not grated)

2 oz/60g sugar or up to 3oz/90g if you prefer

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and heat gently until warm enough. Warm enough means warm enough to be a hot drink, but not boiling, as you'll be boiling off the alcohol which you really don't want to do. It's a good idea to heat it gently once and then leave it for an hour or two with the spices in if you can, to get a really good flavour, and then gently re-warm it when you're ready to drink. Pour it through a sieve into a warm jug and serve with your warm mince pies, preferably standing round the village Christmas tree singing Jingle Bells. And think how much money you could have saved Oz and Jancis.

This is a very bad picture of our village christmas tree, I will go out tomorrow and try to get a better one.

And finally it's quite a good idea to have non alcoholic mulled "wine" as an additional option for children, and drivers, which can be easily made from a bottle of Ribena (don't use the low sugar version for this) diluted with hot water, and with a slice or two of orange and a cinnamon stick.

Sweet Treats for Christmas

Apologies for the lack of postings this week, I've been occupied, like almost everyone else, with Christmassy things entailing much baking of these,

and some of these

and also some of these

I realize these last ones are indistinguishable from a heap of rubbish from my terrible photograph, but they are in fact Christmas Wreaths, adapted from a recipe of Nigella's. If you want to see a picture of what they really look like, have a look at Nigella's Christmas, where you will find a sensible photo. I was making treats to eat at our village Christmas tree lights switching on ceremony last night, and although I made a good stack of mince pies, I know from past experience that small children often don't care for dried fruit generally and mince pies in particular, so I made these treats as an alternative. And very succesful they were too, allowing adults to consume generous amounts of Mulled Wine and mince pies, while they, the children got stuck into the Christmas Cupcakes, Gingerbread Christmas biscuits, and the aforementioned Christmas Wreaths, extracting extravagant sugar fuelled promises along the way from Santa who made his welcome appearance to switch on the lights. Fortunately for the health of the residents, other more sensible people brought some lovely savoury items to counteract the sugary overload of my offerings.

Christmas Cupcakes

I used an 8:8:4 recipe for all in one sponge for these. By which I mean 8 oz SR flour,butter and sugar and 4 eggs ( you see how simple this old imperial measurement is - far easier to remember than metric where the number of eggs, ie 4 bears no relation to the amount of other ingredients ie 250 grams, stop me before I start ranting again....).

Anyway, this amount made around fifty odd cupcakes, so you may like to halve the amounts unless you are considering entertaining the whole neghbourhood's offspring, or you could make larger ones using American style muffin cases instead of little bun cases. You can do the maths. You will need a spot of milk to make the mixture soft enough,and a teaspoon of vanilla essence and be sure to make them small enough to allow for the topping to cover them completely after they have risen.

The topping is royal icing, very easy to make if you have an electric mixer. Just beat 3 egg whites with a 500g packet of icing sugar for about five minutes until the mixture holds soft peaks. I use fresh egg whites because I have an abundance of eggs available to me, but I have used a packet of instant royal icing in the past and it works just as well. I always add a teaspoon of glycerin to the icing to stop it going rock hard, although you should not attempt to keep these little cakes more than a day anyway as they dry out too much. I'm amazed that Christmas Sprinkles for cakes are not available everywhere, at least not in the seasonal red and green colours I like - Tesco's missing an opportunity here - so you have to send off for them, either from Wilton, the US baking supplies people, or sometimes on Ebay. I've also made a lovely discovery that you can buy edible glitter for sprinkling on your cakes to give them that special magical touch - I got mine from the cake decorating department at Hobbycraft. It comes in a tiny pot that will probably last me forever, it looks just like ordinary glitter, but you can eat it without poisoning yourself. Lovely!

As for the little Christmas Wreaths, they are again based again on Nigella's idea

 ( strikes me this picture is almost as bad as mine!)

but I've messed about with the recipe a bit while still keeping to her lovely idea.

6 oz 150g butter

1 200g bag of marshmallows

1 200g bag of caramel toffees

half a teaspoon almond essence

half a teaspoon vanilla essence

 200g cornflakes

Melt the first three ingredients gently together, then bring to a full boil for a minute, then remove from the heat and stir in the essences and the cornflakes crunching them up quite a bit as you go with your wooden spoon. Leave until cool enough to handle and then form into balls, squash down and make a hole in the middle to form a wreath shape decorate with christmas sprinkles and leave to cool. Add little ribbon bows when cool if you like.

Make sure Santa gets some Mulled Wine, recipe tomorrow.

Brazilian Christmas Cake

 I wanted to try something a bit different from the usual rich dark fruit cake this year, so if you fancy a change, try this boozy version of a carrot cake, inspired by my trip to Brazil. Many people find a traditional christmas cake a bit too much on top of all the seasonal excess anyway. Not that you could describe this cake as abstemious or frugal in any way, but a nice change of flavour.

If you don't have any Cachaca (and why would you really?) you can use rum instead.

For an 8" round cake tin you will need -

4 oz raisins

4oz sultanas

2oz chopped ready to eat prunes

4 oz natural colour glace cherries

2oz mixed peel

soaked in -

2 fl oz brandy

2fl oz sherry or port

2 fl oz Cachaca (or rum)

1 teasp Angostura bitters

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

zest and juice of 3 limes and 1 lemon

either in the fridge for a few days, or overnight in the kitchen for the flavours to be absorbed.

When you're ready to make the cake, measure out -

12 oz plain flour

2 teasp ground cinnamon

1 teasp freshly grated nutmeg

2 teasp bicarbonate of soda

into a bowl and set aside.

In your Kitchenaid/Kenwood or with your very strong arm, beat together -

half a pint of sunflower oil

6 oz caster sugar

6oz soft brown sugar

4 eggs

until smooth and creamy

Sieve your flour mix in gently.

Then add

12 oz peeled and finely grated carrot

4 oz dessicated coconut

4 oz chopped walnuts or pecans

all the contents of the pre soaking bowl

It's a bit of a squash in my mixer but mix on a slow speed to incorporate everything.

Then turn into a lined 8" tin and bake in a slow oven about gas 2 until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Should be around the hour and a half mark. It's a bit less in my Aga, maybe more in some ovens. If it looks to be browning too much cover it with a piece of foil towards the end.

While it's baking make up a syrup by warming gently together until melted -

4 oz chopped Rapadura Caipira (this is a Brazilian sweet basically just a solid block of cane sugar but you could easily substitute light brown sugar)

zest and juice of 4 limes

zest and juice of 2 oranges

Cool and stir in

2 or 3 fl oz Cachaca (or rum)

When the cake is cooked, stab it with a skewer and pour the syrup over while the cake is still hot.

Leave it in the tin to cool and absorb the syrup.

I would normally store a christmas cake in the larder, but I think I will keep this one in the freezer until I'm ready to decorate it just before Christmas, just to be on the safe side. It will easily keep for a couple of weeks though, in an airtight tin if you want to make it anytime before Christmas. I will give it a coat of good quality marzipan and fondant icing in the week before Christmas.

Christmas preparations

Well it's November now, so I can start Christmas preparations without too much apology.  In fact  I usually do these dried fruit items in October, but I've been away so much of the last few weeks that there hasn't been time. Until now. So it's Christmas Cake, Christmas pudding, and Mincemeat. Now I realise Dried Fruit Phobics may think of all three of these as being essentially the same thing in a different shape, so I've tried this year, to ensure that all three, despite including vine fruits, are completely different in taste and in texture. Two points - if you have access to a good supply of superior vine fruits from a Turkish shop in Stoke Newington, take advantage of it, but even if you have to use Tesco's it's always worth soaking the fruit in liquid, preferably alcoholic, to plump it up and ensure moistness in the finished item. And if you only use sweet spices like cinnamon at Christmas it's worth buying in new stock because last year's will be dry as dust and about as tasty.So for all that soaking you'll be needing some of this

and some of this

and probably some of this

Don't spend a fortune on alcohol for cooking, it's a waste of money, I don't care what Heston Blumenthall says...

The pudding is the one I've always made, rich dark and traditional. Note I avoided the obvious joke about boyfriends.

The mincemeat is very citrussy, and so much better than anything you can buy in the shops it's well worth the small effort of making. You used to be able to buy a halfway decent mincemeat and just jazz it up with a bit of brandy but all the ones I see nowadays (I hate using that word) but nowadays, they all seem to be made with mouth puckering artificial flavours and some kind of gluey stuff to thicken it up. Yuk.

And my cake this year is a bit Brazilian in theme, (did I mention I went to Brazil...)Not that I imagine they have anything like English Christmas cake in Brazil, but whilst I was there I picked up some of this in the market..

Its a Brazilian sweet which is basically a solidified chunk of sugar cane. It has a lovely rich treacly flavour so I thought I would incorporate some of it into my Christmas cake. If you don't happen to have any Rapadura Caipira on hand you can use Billington's unrefined dark brown sugar, or Muscovado.

If you're going to do all three, I think the most sensible way to go about it is to do all of them together, spread over a couple of days as they all involve soaking fruit in various alcoholic liquids to swell them up and ensure a moist, flavourfull result. A slight side effect of this is that your kitchen smells like a distillery with great vats of alcoholic dried fruit macerating in various bowls, which I rather like. So anyway you will need three large bowls.

Bowl 1 Christmas Pudding

The pudding is essentially the same incendiary device that I've made for years, you either love it or hate it, but it's dark, traditional and spicy, and for many years when my children were young I made it and brought it out only to set it on fire for the sake of tradition, and return it to the kitchen untouched, except by me. I detect a slightly more enthusiastic audience for it these days, and anyway I still love it, with a big blob of clotted cream gently melting over it. I can hardly wait.

Ingredients
1 lb of mixed dried fruit, about half of it currants, a small amount of dried peel, (about an ounce) and the rest sultanas and raisins.
zest and juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon
1 teaspoon mixed spice
half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg
half a teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 oz soft dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon black treacle or molasses
a glug of rum
2 oz ground almonds
4 oz fresh white breadcrumbs
2 oz  flour
4 oz shredded suet
half a pint of barley wine or stout or Old Peculiar
2 egggs
a 2 pint/1 litre pudding bowl - if you use a plastic one with a lid you can dispense with the greaseproof covering in the picture providing you don't lose the lid, like some people.

Take large bowl number one and put in the dried fruit, citrus, spices, sugar, treacle and rum. Stir.

Add everything else and stir well. Make sure everyone in the house gets to stir and make a wish, then leave the bowl until the next day, when you turn it into a 2 pint pudding basin, insert silver treasure items (I do have some small American coins which look prettier, but you have to take account of visiting family members, either very old or very young who may break dentures or choke on small bits of metal in the pudding, so I go for big pound coins, which are easy to spot, soaked overnight in vinegar to clean them)

then cover and steam for hours.

And hours.
Eight hours will be needed to get the dark rich colour of the traditional pudding. If you use a pressure cooker you can steam it for half an hour and then pressure cook for 3 hours. But apart from ensuring that it doesn't boil dry you can ignore it. Allow it to cool and store in a cool cupboard until Christmas. You can reheat it in minutes on the day if you have a microwave oven, otherwise steam for another hour or so before serving. Turn out the lights, warm your brandy or rum and set it alight before pouring over the pudding and bringing triumphantly to the table in the traditional manner. Don't forget the clotted cream. Try not to set the house on fire.

In bowl number 2 Mincemeat
I make a lot of mincemeat, because I need a lot of mince pies for one reason or another, we just get through loads of them. I always like to have some to offer people around Christmas and New Year, I expect people get fed up of them, but it's Christmas, you have to have mince pies, it's the law.

2 lbs of mixed dried fruit, this time you need predominantly raisins about half, and the rest currants and sultanas and a small amount of dried candied peel.
8 oz shredded suet
12 oz granulated sugar
2 tablespoons molasses or black treacle
zest and juice of 2 oranges and 3 lemons depending on size
4 teaspoons mixed spice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
half teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
half a teaspoon ground cloves
1 lb peeled and grated bramley apples
2 oz chopped glace cherries
large glug of rum

Put everything except the rum into bowl 2 and stir. Leave overnight. You can put it into jars straight away, but the problem with mincemeat with a high fruit content is that it tends to ferment, which can be very annoying, and can even lead to exploding jars. The Jackson Pollock Mincemeat Effect is not a good look even in the contemporary kitchen. To avoid this I now use Delia's method of heating the mixture in a warm oven for an hour or two until it's heated through and the suet melted. Leave it to cool and stir occasionally, to distribute the fat evenly thoughout.

 Add the rum and stir in. Keep in sterilized jars, in a cool larder. It doesn't look as pretty after being heated but it doesn't harm the flavour, and it does help prevent the fermentation problem.

Use a good sweet shortcrust recipe for your mince pies see this post for a recipe. Keep a cooked supply of mince pies in the freezer ready to be whipped out and warmed in the oven at  a moment's notice, until your friends and neighbours are too scared to come round any more.

Bowl 3 Christmas cake
 As I'm trying out a slightly different recipe this year I will report back after it's done, and let you know if it's ok or whether you might be better off going to someone else's house for Christmas Tea.