Recipes, guides and kitchen know-how. Mostly useful, occasionally silly.
Christmas Pudding Recipe - Everyone Stirs, Everyone Wishes, Nobody Tells
Soak the fruit overnight, let everyone stir and wish, steam for six hours, then wrap it up until Christmas and reheat it for two. One pudding for 8, with an alcohol-free version and the lowdown on the coin.
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- Prep30 min
- SoakOvernight
- Cook6 hr
- Serves8
- Calories~540
Calories are approximate, per serving, worked out from the ingredients. Brands and portion sizes vary.
Christmas pudding is the only dessert you make in November, forget about for five weeks, then set on fire in front of your family.
Nobody would accept that from any other food. Imagine doing it to a trifle.
It's also the one recipe where the whole house gets involved. Everyone takes a turn with the spoon, everyone makes a wish, and nobody is allowed to say what they wished for. Erin wished for the first slice. She told everyone. She says royal wishes don't count as secrets.
This Christmas pudding recipe is the proper dark, sticky, fruit-packed one. I went through the classics from Delia, Mary Berry, Nigella, Felicity Cloake's side-by-side tests, the Hairy Bikers and a stack of very honest reader comments, then kept what they agree on and fixed what people say goes wrong.
The short version: soak the fruit overnight, stir, steam for six hours, wrap it up and leave it alone. On the day it needs two more hours of steam and a match. The match is optional. Aaron would like it to be compulsory that it's optional.
There's an alcohol-free version too, and everything you need to know about the coin. Spoiler: Erin will find it. Erin always finds it.
Now showing
The whole family, one wooden spoon, a lot of wishing and a brief moment of controlled fire. Santa turns up. Jingle bells are involved.
Thirty-nine seconds. Less time than it takes Aaron to find the brandy.
What is Stir-up Sunday?
It's the day you make the pudding. This year it's Sunday 22 November, five weeks before Christmas.
The name comes from church, not the kitchen. The prayer read on the last Sunday before Advent, in the Book of Common Prayer since 1549, starts: "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people." Somewhere along the way, the faithful people took it literally and went and stirred a pudding.
The pudding-making bit is mostly a Victorian habit that really caught on in the 1920s. The pudding itself is much older. It started life as plum pottage, a sort of spiced porridge with meat and dried fruit, and slowly turned sweet. "Plum" just meant dried fruit, which is why there isn't a plum in sight.
The cook Eliza Acton was the first to call it a "Christmas pudding", in 1845. And no, Prince Albert didn't bring it over from Germany. That was the tree. The University of Reading's historians have the full story, myths and all.
Then there are the traditions people swear by: 13 ingredients for Jesus and the apostles, and stirring from east to west in honour of the Wise Men. Historians reckon both were added later. We do them anyway. Isaac quietly checked the compass app and we'd all been stirring north. He didn't say anything for an hour.
Word association with Ayden: I said "pudding". He said "custard". I said "proof". He's still working out how I won that one.
What you need
For the pudding (one 1.4 litre pudding, serves 8)
- 150g currants, 150g sultanas and 150g raisins. The fruit is most of the pudding, so don't skimp. Currant affairs are very serious in this house.
- 50g chopped mixed peel
- 25g chopped almonds - optional, for a bit of crunch
- 1 small eating apple, cored and grated (about 75g) - it keeps the pudding moist
- 125g shredded suet, beef or vegetable. Butter works but makes it heavier. Suet yourself.
- 100g fresh white breadcrumbs - not optional. Breadcrumbs plus flour is what stops it being a cannonball.
- 75g self-raising flour
- 150g light brown soft sugar. Dark muscovado can taste bitter after six hours.
- 1 tsp mixed spice, ¼ tsp grated nutmeg and a pinch of ground cinnamon
- A little soft butter for the basin
For the soak and the mix
The wet bits. Eesha has asked that they stay in their bowls and not "wander about the worktop like Year 9 at lunch".
- 175ml brandy for soaking the fruit - or 175ml orange juice for the alcohol-free version (see the small print further down)
- Finely grated zest and juice of 1 orange
- 1 tbsp black treacle - for colour and that deep, toffee-ish flavour
- 2 eggs
- 75ml milk - it makes the crumb softer and squidgier
- For later: 1-2 tbsp brandy to feed it, and 2-3 tbsp more if you want to flame it on the day
Kit
- A 1.4 litre (2½ pint) pudding basin, ceramic or plastic
- Baking parchment, foil and kitchen string
- A sharp pair of kitchen scissors for the parchment, the foil and the string
- A big saucepan with a lid, deep enough to cover the basin, and an old saucer or trivet to sit it on
- A big mixing bowl, a wooden spoon and a whisk for the eggs
How to make Christmas pudding
Step 1 - Soak the fruit the night before
- Tip the currants, sultanas, raisins and mixed peel into a large bowl.
- Pour over the 175ml brandy (or orange juice), plus the orange zest and juice. Stir well.
- Cover with a tea towel and leave overnight. If you're using orange juice, leave it in the fridge.
- Give it a stir before bed if you remember. I never remember. I'm normally three tabs into something else.
By morning the fruit will have drunk most of the liquid and gone fat and glossy. This is where the flavour comes from, so don't skip it.
Step 2 - Mix it, stir it, make a wish
- Core and grate the apple. An apple corer gets the middle out in one push, so you can grate it skin and all.
- In your biggest bowl, mix the suet, breadcrumbs, flour, sugar, spices, almonds and grated apple.
- Tip in the soaked fruit and any liquid left in the bowl.
- Beat the eggs with the milk and treacle, then stir that in too. Warm the spoon in hot water first and the treacle slides straight off.
- It should be a soft mixture that drops off the spoon. If it's stiff, add a splash more milk.
- Now everyone takes a turn to stir, eyes closed, making a silent wish.
Our bowl did the rounds twice. Lara stirred while humming the whole of a musical, just to put Ayden off his wish. It worked. He started humming it too.
For the eggs, a whisk with a scraper in the handle also gets the last of the mixture off the sides of the bowl. Isaac has offered to do this bit with his finger instead. Payment, he says.
Step 3 - Into the basin, pleat and tie
- Butter the basin well and put a small circle of baking parchment in the bottom. This is your insurance policy for turning it out.
- Spoon in the mixture, press it down gently and level the top. Leave a 2-3cm gap at the top for it to rise.
- Lay a sheet of baking parchment on a sheet of foil and fold a pleat about 3cm wide across the middle. That gives the pudding room to puff up.
- Put it over the basin, parchment side down, and tie string tightly under the rim. Take the string over the top and tie it the other side to make a handle.
- Trim off the excess parchment and foil with your scissors, leaving about 5cm hanging down.
The handle isn't for show. You will be lifting this out of boiling water, so make it strong. Raisin the bar, as it were.
Step 4 - Steam it for six hours
- Put an upturned saucer or a trivet in the bottom of a big pan and sit the basin on it.
- Pour in boiling water from the kettle until it comes halfway up the side of the basin.
- Put the lid on and keep it at a gentle simmer for 6 hours.
- Top up with boiling water every hour or so. Set a timer. Then set another one.
- It's done when it's a deep, dark brown and a skewer pushed into the middle comes out clean.
That's how to steam a Christmas pudding the old way. Slow cooker? Sit the basin in it with boiling water halfway up and cook on high for about 8 hours. Same pudding. Far less pan-watching.
Never let the pan boil dry, and never top it up with cold water. Cold water knocks it off the boil, and an empty pan burns the bottom of the pudding (and the pan). Halfway up the basin, boiling water from the kettle, every hour. Steamed up about it? So was I, the first time.
Step 5 - Wrap it up, feed it, forget it
- Lift the basin out by its handle and let it cool completely.
- Take off the old wrapping. Poke a few holes in the top with a skewer and spoon over 1-2 tablespoons of brandy.
- Wrap the top in fresh parchment and foil and tie it again.
- Store it somewhere cool, dark and dry - a cupboard, not above the kettle. It keeps for up to about 3 months.
- If you like, feed it another spoonful every week or two until Christmas.
The sugar and the alcohol are what let it keep, which is why the alcohol-free version lives in the fridge instead (more on that below). We call it maturing. Erin calls it "the waiting pudding". She's not wrong.
Step 6 - Reheat it and bring it in on fire
- On the day, steam it exactly as before, with a fresh pleated cover, for 2 hours.
- Lift it out, take off the wrapping, run a knife round the edge and turn it out onto a warm plate.
- To flame it: warm 2-3 tablespoons of brandy in a small pan or a metal ladle, turn the heat off, then light it with a long match and pour it over.
- Light it at the table, not in the kitchen. Don't carry a flaming pudding about, and keep sleeves, hair and paper hats well back.
That's how to reheat Christmas pudding properly. In a hurry, you can microwave it instead, out of its foil and with no coin in it, in short bursts until it's steaming hot all the way through. Reheat it once only, as the Food Standards Agency's reheating advice says.
No brandy, no suet, and the coin - the small print
The jokes take a short break here, because this bit matters.
- Alcohol-free: soak the fruit in orange juice (in the fridge) instead of brandy, and skip the feeding. Without the alcohol it won't keep in a cupboard, so store it in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze it for up to 3 months. Defrost it fully before you reheat it.
- Vegetarian: use vegetable suet. Everything else stays the same.
- The coin: use a silver sixpence or a silver charm, never a modern coin. Boil it for 10 minutes, wrap it in a twist of baking parchment (not foil) and push it in before steaming. Tell everyone it's in there, and leave it out if small children are eating. Erin has never once not found it. We've stopped asking how.
- Flaming it safely: only the alcohol vapour burns, which is why the brandy has to be warm to catch. BBC Science Focus explains why the pudding itself doesn't burn. The flames can be almost invisible in a bright room, so dim the lights, and use plastic holly - real berries are poisonous and the leaves catch. Dim lights: partly for safety, mostly for drama.
- Smaller pudding: halve everything and use a 0.9 litre basin. It needs about 5 hours of steaming.
And if you want the most traditional Christmas pudding recipe going, add a splash of stout to the soak. Plenty of old recipes do. If you'd rather an easy Christmas pudding recipe for a first go, this is it as written. The proof of the pudding, and all that.
If it goes wrong
It crumbled when I turned it out? Usually it was sliced while still too hot, or it needed longer steaming.
Fix: Let it sit for 5 minutes after turning out, and steam the full time - the skewer should come out clean. Aaron says crumbly isn't the same as flaky. He would know.
Soggy and pale on top? Water got in under the cover.
Fix: Fold the parchment and foil with a proper pleat, tie the string tight under the rim, and keep the water only halfway up. It's a pudding, not a swimming lesson.
Stuck in the basin? The basin wasn't buttered enough.
Fix: Butter it well, use a parchment circle in the bottom, and run a knife round the edge before turning it out. Then a confident flip. Hesitation is how puddings sense fear.
The pan boiled dry? Nobody topped it up.
Fix: Top up with boiling water every hour, and set a timer. If the bottom has caught, trim it off. Nobody needs to know. Erin will know.
Heavy as a cannonball? The breadcrumbs got left out, or the mixture was too stiff.
Fix: Use flour and breadcrumbs together, and loosen a stiff mix with a splash of milk until it drops off the spoon. Light enough to lift with one hand. Ideally.
Mould on it in storage? It was kept somewhere warm or steamy, or it was the alcohol-free one.
Fix: Cupboards only, well away from the kettle and cooker. Alcohol-free puddings go in the fridge or freezer. If there's mould, bin it. Sorry. No rescues on that one.
What to serve it with
Custard is the law in our house. Cream is allowed for visitors. Erin has decreed both. On the same slice.
- Custard, hot and plenty of it
- Ice cream - or go further and try a no-machine ice cream with leftover pudding folded through
- Leftovers, fried in butter the next morning. Boxing Day breakfast of champions.
- For anyone who won't touch it, biscuits that keep their legs on. There's always one.
Getting the pudding steaming while the turkey, potatoes and everything else fight over the oven? Here's a minute-by-minute plan for Christmas Day. The pudding pan goes on the hob, which is why it's such a good one to make ahead.
Oliver would like it noted that a pinch of chilli in the pudding is "a bold choice nobody has tried". Several people have tried it. We're not doing it.
That's it. Soak, stir, wish, steam, wrap, wait, light.
Now go and stir something.
