Welcome back to my Christmas Pudding Chronicles. This is a holiday series in which I, an outsider to the British tradition of fig pudding, try to find my way through making one. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my musings on the experience and maybe even be inspired to join in. The Christmas Pudding-making process traditionally begins five Sundays before Christmas, but if you decide to join in later, that’s totally fine. You can steam this thing and set it on fire the same day if you want. (If you read last week’s post about soaking fruit, that’ll make sense, I swear.) Otherwise, you’ll have to “harden” the “cake” with a dose of brandy with me once a week until the big day. But before I get too far ahead of myself, today is important. It’s steam day.

A Christmas pudding is a steamed cake, and as I said, it takes place five Sundays before Christmas. That’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so if you start it around that time, you’ll be just in time. Also called Stir-up Sunday, this is the day you get to mix all the ingredients together and make wishes while you stir. You can put clean tokens in the batter for a lucky person to find on Christmas Day, or do without. I don’t like surprise hard things in my food, so I left it out. Then you steam the cake for five hours. I know it takes a while, but pick a day when you’re mostly around the kitchen and the time will fly by.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm using Nigella Lawson's recipe as a guide. I've made a few minor changes here and there, and I'll go through them in a moment.

These are the ingredients I used: