5. Cloves - Plum Pudding

Cloves and Christmas go hand in hand so thought I'd better do a festive recipe. I am aiming for something rich, fruity and boozy with this recipe (based on one of Dan Lepard's Stir Up Sunday recipes) but I won't know how it turns out until Christmas Day so I'll update this post when it's been turned out of its basin and I've had a taste.

I've made a few tweaks to the recipe - one of which is that I started mine the night before and soaked the fruit in a mixture of port and brandy.

This makes 2 puddings in 700ml pudding basins.

Ingredients

600g dried fruit (heavy on prunes and figs - I used 250g prunes, 250g figs, 150g sour cherries and 50g raisins)
A generous splosh of brandy and port
200g dark muscovado sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground allspice
Grated zest of 2 oranges and 100ml juice
150ml stout
4 free range egg yolks
100g plain flour
150g chopped walnuts
100g melted butter
100g soft breadcrumbs

Method

Start this the night before. Chop the prunes and figs into pieces and mix in a large bowl with the cherries, raisins, brandy and port. There's no need for the fruit to be swimming in the alcohol, just add a generous splash of each to moisten the mix.

The following day take your bowl of boozy fruit and add each of the other ingredients, thoroughly combining each one before adding the next.

Divide the mixture between 2 buttered pudding basins. Unfortunately I hadn't checked how much foil I had before I started this and when I came to seal the basins I didn't have much. Ideally you want a layer of baking parchment and 2 layers of foil over the top of the basin, tied around with string. I had limited foil so did one layer around each basin tied up with garden twine! Hopefully that will have done the job (won't know until Christmas Day!).

Place the puddings in one huge saucepan/two large saucepans and fill up to about 3/4 up the side of the basins with boiling water from the kettle. Simmer for 3 hours.

The puddings then get another simmering for 3 hours on Christmas Day. The recipe didn't mention this but in hindsight I wished I'd used a trivet on the bottom of each pan. My fingers are crossed that the puddings haven't been overcooked on the bottom (eventually the top). Watch this space for the results at the end of December!