Our Food Director Sarah is a food obsessive, and spends most of her time scoping out the latest food trends, experimenting in her own kitchen, or making her family wait to eat while she photographs every dinner she makes for the 'gram! A complete Middle Eastern food junkie, she is never far from a good shawarma marinade, a pinch of Aleppo chilli or a sprig of dill
See more of Sarah Akhurst ’s recipes
Sarah Akhurst
Our Food Director Sarah is a food obsessive, and spends most of her time scoping out the latest food trends, experimenting in her own kitchen, or making her family wait to eat while she photographs every dinner she makes for the 'gram! A complete Middle Eastern food junkie, she is never far from a good shawarma marinade, a pinch of Aleppo chilli or a sprig of dill
See more of Sarah Akhurst ’s recipes
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Ingredients
250g dried apricots, roughly chopped
200g golden sultanas (or jumbo raisins and cranberries mix)
75ml Grand Marnier, plus 3 tbsp extra to flame
100g soft salted butter, plus extra to grease
75g light brown sugar
4 tbsp golden syrup
zest and juice of 3 clementines (easy peelers)
2 large eggs
125g self-raising flour
75g brioche, whizzed into crumbs
2 tsp ground mixed spice
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The pudding can be made up to a month ahead and stored in a cool dark place, or can be frozen for up to 1 year.
Put the apricots and sultanas in a bowl with the Grand Marnier and leave to steep for an hour. Generously butter a 1.5 litre pudding basin and cut a small disc of baking paper for the base.
Cream the butter, sugar and syrup with the clementine zest. Add the eggs, beating well after each addition, then fold through the flour, brioche crumbs and mixed spice. Finally, stir through the citrus juice and steeped fruit and transfer to the prepared basin.
To cook, put a trivet at the bottom of a deep saucepan – you can use a jam jar lid for this if you don’t have a trivet. Make a handle from a long piece of folded foil and place over the trivet, with the ends of the strip hanging over the edge of the pan.
Cut a large square of baking paper, and butter one side. Cut an equal-sized piece of foil and place the baking paper on top, buttered side up. Fold a pleat in the middle, securing the two pieces together, then place over the pudding basin, with the buttered side of the baking paper facing down. Fold over the edge of the basin and secure with string.
Sit the basin on the trivet, making sure that the foil handle is under the bowl. Pour in boiling water so that it reaches halfway up the pudding basin. Cover the pan and leave to simmer for 3 hours. Keep a check on the water and top up as necessary to keep the level roughly the same throughout the cooking time.
To serve straight away, lift the pudding basin out of the pan, using the foil handle. Remove the foil and paper lid and place a serving plate on top of the bowl. Invert the pudding and turn out. Warm the extra Grand Marnier in a small pan, take it immediately to the table, pour it over the pudding and light with a long match. Leave the flames to extinguish themselves before serving.
To store the pudding, allow it to cool completely before removing the foil lid. Wrap the entire pudding basin in foil and store in a cool place until ready to use.
To reheat, cover with a new buttered paper and foil lid as above, and cook in the same way for around an hour to heat through. Follow the instructions in step 6 for serving.
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In fact, they just get better with age. Many of my customers like to buy their pudding a year in advance and let it continue to mature. If you love an aged pudding, you might want to consider a pudding from our vintage range. These puddings have been allowed to mature for an additional year.
Adding silver coins into plum pudding is a fun Christmas tradition. The notion being that whoever finds the coin will have good luck. The tradition may date as far back as early as the 1300s when several small items like dried peas and chicken wishbones were added to the pudding mixture.
It was common practice to include small silver coins in the pudding mixture, which could be kept by the person whose serving included them. The usual choice was a silver threepence or a sixpence.
The pudding we know today began life as a pottage. This was a kind of broth, including raisins and other dried fruit, spices and wine. It was thickened with breadcrumbs or ground almonds. Not dissimilar to the mince pies of yesteryear, it often included meat or at least meat stock.
Some Christmas puddings, made with dried fruit in the traditional way, are fine to be eaten as much as two years after they were made. "Bear in mind if the pudding is alcohol-free, of course, it will last a good while with the sugar content, but it will not last as long without alcohol to preserve it," stresses Juliet.
Conclusion: Christmas puddings contain ethanol that does not all evaporate during the cooking process. However, the rise in BAC after ingestion of a typical slice of Christmas pudding was negligible and unlikely to affect work performance or safety or impair a health care worker's ability to make complex decisions.
Superstitions say that Christmas pudding must be prepared with 13 ingredients, which are said to represent Jesus and his twelve disciples. It is also said that the mixture should be stirred in turn from east to west, by each family member, to honour the disciples' journey.
It is believed that a Christmas pudding must contain thirteen ingredients. These ingredients each represent Jesus and each of his twelve disciples. Traditionally, brandy is poured over the Christmas pudding and set aflame before serving. The flames are believed to represent Christ's passion.
A silver sixpence was placed into the pudding mix and every member of the household gave the mix a stir. Whoever found the sixpence in their own piece of the pudding on Christmas Day would see it as a sign that they would enjoy wealth and good luck in the year to come.
It's made with alcohol and dried fruit and is a traditional English dessert. It's more like a cake than what Americans think of as a soft, custard-like pudding. Figgy pudding is also known as Christmas pudding or plum pudding. It can also be affectionately called “pud.”
It's best not to. Suet is a very hard fat, which melts slowly through a mixture during the cooking, whereas butter melts very easily and quickly through a mixture. They are different types of fats and shouldn't be substituted for each other.
I've normally got some left over and eat them through the year. I'd cook them, then give them a sniff, see if they smell ok. I would and have eaten Christmas puddings at least that far out of date, it'll be fine.
During the aging process, the many compounds in the pudding begin to break down, releasing new compounds, like aldehydes and esters, which are associated with sweet, fruity flavours and aromas.
If it's dry boxed pudding, the kind that you add milk to before cooking, it's probably fine. If it's a ready-to-eat pudding cup, don't risk it. Although “best by” dates are more to protect the manufacturer than to estimate shelf life, two years is a lot of time for bacteria to access and colonize food.
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Prep time: 15 mins
