Every week is a big week when it comes to making a Christmas pudding. Welcome back to my Christmas Pudding Chronicles. It’s week three of documenting my quest to make one of the UK’s most ubiquitous Christmas cakes. While this wouldn’t be quite as appealing if I lived under the King’s roof, as an American it is indeed a new Christmas experience.

If you’re new to this fruitcake fantasy, you can catch up on what a Christmas pudding is and how to soak the fruit in week one, and read about how I steamed the cake here . Typically, a Christmas pudding is made five Sundays before Christmas, and “fed” once a week on Sunday. Each edition of this chronicle will be published on a Saturday, so you can gather the ingredients you need and tend to your pudding the next day. That said, feel free to jump in at any time. You don’t have to stick to the rules like I do, and your pudding doesn’t have to mature as long.

I’m finally at the stage of ‘hardening the cake’, which involves soaking it (completely optional) in brandy or another spirit like rum or whiskey. While you can skip this practice, wrap the pudding and store it in a dark place until Christmas, this step will add flavor and moisture. I have to admit that ‘feeding’ the pudding is one of the steps I’m most looking forward to. I’m not an alcoholic, but I do like a good culinary process to keep track of. Plus, I like to check on my plum baby once a week to see how he’s getting older. If that’s when I dose my cake with alcohol, so be it.

As I said in my previous posts, I used Nigella Lawson's recipe as a guideline and made a few adjustments here and there. Her website also gives some advice on how to "feed" it. I've compared this with other blogs and it seems that the usual practice is to poke a few holes in the pudding with a toothpick or skewer and dab one to two tablespoons of liqueur on top once a week. Easy enough.