The pudding story

As promised, the story of the Christmas puddings. In the UK our family traditionally make
our own Christmas cake and Christmas pudding. Both of these are very rich fruit based
desserts. I don't like Christmas cake but I like pudding. The reason for this is that I
don't like candied peel. So while my mother follows the recipe for the cake I omit the peel
from the pudding. I put in some finely chopped glace cherries instead.

I couldn't remember the recipe because it's very long so I asked my family to send it to me.
I remembered the ingredients roughly though, so for the last couple of weeks I've been
buying some stuff each time I go to the shop. I'd accumulated raisins, sultanas, currants,
spices, etc by the time the recipe arrived.

The recipe turned up on Friday and I figured I had to make the puddings that weekend because
they take 8 hours to cook. Cooking them during the week would involve getting up several
times during the night to check the water level so there wasn't really a choice. We went to
the shops on Saturday and bought the remaining ingredients together with pudding bowls, huge
mixing bowl and an extra saucepan for the cooking. We have one large saucepan but as the
puddings take 8 hours to steam and I was planning on cooking two I decided it would be best
to get another saucepan rather than being tied to the stove for 16 hours.

I also searched Brisbane for a trivet but I couldn't find one anywhere. As the only purpose
of the trivet is to keep the bowl off the bottom of the saucepan during steaming I figured
I'd have to improvise. I bought some metal cookie cutters!

We got home from the shop and layed out all the ingredients. At that point I realised that
when I'd been buying fruit I'd bought the last packet of currants at the supermarket and
they had no more. So I was short by one packet of currants. Went back to the city and
bought some. Not a good start.

The next challenge was weighing out the ingredients. I'd forgotten to buy scales in the
city and I didn't want to make a 3rd trip. I asked the neighbours but no one had any scales
I could borrow. So I done what any normal person would do. I converted the recipe into
grams (my mother still uses pounds and ounces) and then made my own scales/balance. This
consisted of a large piece of wood which I drilled and inserted two pencils to act as a
pivot in the centre.

I then measured out 50ml, 100ml of water, 200 ml of water which I transferred into those
very light plastic sandwich bags, tied them in knots and removed the excess plastic. I then
used this to weigh out my ingrediants.

The mixing went without drama. Juicing the oranges and lemons was difficult without a
juicer but I'd already considered this at the shop and bought extra.

The mixture had to rest over night so now we fast forward to Sunday morning.

I transferred the mix into the bowls and put two layers of tin foil over the top. Now to
secure with string. Shit. No string. No worries though, did you know the laces from 32
holes Doc Martins go around a pudding bowl twice leaving just the right amount to tie a
knot? Well, you do now.

Then I realised the cookie cutter trivets held the bowls too high in the water. More
improvisation required. In the end I used the metal lids from beer bottles. Had to drink
the beer as it doesn't keep untopped very well. Shame eh?

The cooking seemed to go very well. We had ample mix left over to make two further smaller
puddings so I refilled the bowls and went to the stove. I turned it on and there was a
bang. We're now waiting for the real estate to fix our cooker.

At least we got two puddings out of it all though. I may just buy one next year...