Puddings Aplenty!

If you followed the Christmas Pudding Recipe, you'll have a big bowl of rich Christmassy stuff in the fridge. Now you're going to boil it. For six hours.



You obviously need to plan this so you'll be around for six hours. You'll need some tinfoil, some butter muslin, some greaseproof paper, a little butter and a 2 litre Pyrex bowl. Oh, and some kitchen string. Cut two rounds of greaseproof paper using the bowl's rim as a guide.

Butter the bowl well and slosh the pudding mix into it. Top this with the disks of greaseproof and then fold a double layer of muslin over the top. Tie this under the rim of the bowl with some kitchen string, making sure it's good and tight. If you're feeling clever, tie the last loop of string over the bowl to act as a handle - as long as the string's good and tight (and so won't slip over the lip and send the bowl tumbling), you'll have a handy burnt-finger saving handle.

Fold a couple of feet of tinfoil up to make a square pad and place this on the base of a largeish pan, adding the pudding. Ideally you should use a pan that leaves space around the pudding bowl because you're going to need to pour boiling water into the pan without soaking the pudding. The foil pad acts in place of an upturned plate in keeping the pudding clear of the hotter base of the pan. Boil up a kettle of water and pour this into the pan, turning on the heat and topping the pan up to a couple of centimetres short of the rim of the bowl. And set it to a gentle boil. Cover and find something better to do with your time, returning every 30 minutes or so to check and top up the water. Six hours later, stop doing this and let the pudding cool.



When the pudding's good and cold (probably the next day), remove the muslin and greaseproof and give the pudding a good poke with a sharp stick all over. Pour brandy over the top so that it soaks into the holes, then cover the pudding with another couple of disks of greaseproof and some more muslin. At this stage, I usually tie the muslin down with masking tape as its easier to remove it for topping up sessions.

Every week or so leading up to Christmas, pull the pudding out of the deep recess in your fridge and give it a slosh of brandy. Re-tie the coverings and pop it back again.



On the day, you need to allow two hours for the pudding to cook. Do the whole tinfoil pad/pan thing again and boil it up as before. Upend it on a warm serving dish and slip some nice warm brandy over the top. Ignite and serve with the lights out.

Christmas Pudding Time!

What do you mean it "looks icky"? 

That's what real food looks like when you don't have gangs of stylists 

dancing around spraying it with gelatine and primping it!

The house smelled of Christmas last night - a little belatedly, I finally got it together and managed to gather the little collection of things that go into Christmas Pudding - that finest of seasonal treats.

The original recipe's linked here, but it makes two puddings and I just want the one this Christmas, thanks. So I've adapted it and given this year's version below. So here's a Christmas pudding recipe that'll serve a generous four and a reasonable six.

Ingredients

• 125g sultanas
• 125 currants
• 1/2 carrot, grated
• 1 small apple, grated
• 70g candied mixed peel, chopped
• 30g chopped almonds
• 1 lemon, zest and 1/2 the juice
• 1 orange, zest and 1/2 the juice
• 70g self raising flour
• 125g breadcrumbs
• 125g suet (Atora light is just fine)
• 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 175g muscovado sugar
• 1 tbsp date syrup
• 2 tbsp brandy
• 2 fresh eggs, whisked
• 250ml Guinness

Measure everything into a roomy mixing  bowl (ideally one of those yellow-glazed ones you make your bread in!) and stir it up, giving it a good old slosh around to mix in well. Tradition chez McNabb dictates that everyone in the household has a stir. Cover it over and whack it in the fridge for a day or two.

I'll do the rest of it in a couple of days' time when I boil the pudding.

Caramelised Apple Tart

This utterly divine soft set tart is something you might find in Normandy. In fact, whilst the recipe doesn’t call for it, the judicious use of calvados, that divine Norman spirit, at just the right time would be a winner here. You might even consider putting some in the tart as well.

This tart will feed 8.


You will need:

(For the sweet pastry)

225g plain flour
150g unsalted butter, softened
1 level tbsp caster sugar
2 egg yolks beaten with 1 tbsp cold water
Pinch salt

(for the filling)

900g Cox or Granny Smith apples
1 cinnamon stick
50g lightly salted butter
110g granulated sugar
200ml crème fraiche
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract


You also need a deep, fluted tart tin about 23cm in diameter.

And then you need to:

First make the pastry. Chuck all the pastry ingredients into a food processor and whizz until the mixture forms crumbs. Tip out and bring it together by hand, don’t overdo it though, light touches required.

Pop the pastry into a plastic bag and chill in the fridge for 45 minutes. The pastry, not you.

Once rested roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a circle at least 30cm diameter and carefully lift into the tart tin. Press gently into place and trim the edges.

Chill again in the fridge for a further 20mins. Heat the oven to 200C/400F

Line the pastry case with baking paper and fill with baking beans or uncooked rice, and bake blind on a baking sheet for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and the beans/rice and bake for a further 5 minutes. Remove from the oven.

Meanwhile prepare the apples. Peel and core them and chop into eighths. Place half of them in a saucepan with the cinnamon and 1 tbsp of water. If you have used granny Smiths also chuck in a small tsp of sugar. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes until softened.

Remove the cinnamon and beat the apples to a puree.

Then melt the salted butter in a frying pan, add the sugar and allow to bubble together to form a fudgy caramel sauce, then continue to cook it over a lowish heat until it darkens to a rich toffee colour. Add the remaining sliced apples and toss them to coat. It will go a bit messy at first but as the apples release their juices it will all go smooth again.

Cook for about 5 minutes then set to one side.

Spread the apple puree over the pastry base, then lift the apple slices out of the caramel sauce and arrange over the apple puree. In a separate bowl whisk together the crème fraîche, the egg and the vanilla extract, then add the caramel sauce. When well mixed pour over the apples in the tart.

Bake on the centre shelf of the oven for 20 to 30 minutes until the filling is softly set and golden on top. Allow to cool a little before serving.

Yummo!

Pithiviers

This is classic French cookery: simple, straightforward and truly brilliant. It is traditionally served with a distinctive swirl of knife cuts on the lid and can be eaten warm or cold. It's Sarah's favourite end to dinner parties and disappears very quickly indeed to be followed by the sounds of over-indulged people regretting that second slice - it's pretty rich.

Does it come from the town of Pithiviers in France? Do I look like I care?

Ingredients
Pastry

• 500g puff pastry
• 1 egg yolk, beaten
• 2 tbsp milk

Filling

• 100g butter, softened
• 100g caster sugar, sifted
• 6 egg yolks
• 150g ground almond
• 2-3 drops almond essence
• 2-3 drops vanilla exract
• 2 tbsp brandy

Pre-heat the oven to GM7/220C/425F.

Beat the butter and sugar to a light cream. This will take some time/effort unless you’re smart and use a hand whizzer with a beater attachment. We’re looking at a white coloured, smooth paste before you start adding the egg yolks one at a time, beating each one in well to combine it before adding the next. If you rush this, it’ll curdle. If that happens then smack yourself around the head for being an idiot and then add in a teaspoon or two of flour to the mixture, which should restore things.

Once all the eggs are combined with the sugar, beat in the ground almonds, brandy, almond essence and vanilla extract.

Halve the pastry and roll it out on a cool, well-floured surface to give two 25cm squares. Spoon the filling in a 20cm circle on one square, giving yourself a good 2cm clear pastry all around filling. Brush around the filling with water, then place the second pastry square on top. Cut a circle out around the filling and that 2cm gap, then knock up the edges to give a nice, secure round parcel of filling. Score the top with a spiral pattern of four light cuts swirling around from the centre to the edges and then brush with the egg yolk and milk mixed together.

Bake for 25-30 minutes in the centre of the oven. Serve warm or cold (better warm!) with a lot of whipped cream. I like to chuck some vanilla and a spoon of something French into the cream just to be naughty...

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Let me be quite clear. This recipe is wrong. It’s not politically correct. It’s just plain not right. You shouldn’t be eating it. It’s not good for you. It’ll kill you, eventually.

OK? Consider yourself warned.

Cumbria is a magical part of England. Around the Lake District you will find many places to thrill and inspire, to awe and delight. It’s like a huge LG washing machine/fridge special offer out there. If you do find yourself in the area, a pilgrimage to Miller Howe is obviously something for the diary – but take my word for it and go and eat at the Drunken Duck at Ambleside. It remains one of my most memorable, stunning, breathtakingly awe-inspiringly wonderful and utterly glorious eating experiences. I might be underselling it.

When you’re exploring the area in the cool and fog of winter, if you’re lucky you’ll find the unprepossessing village of Cartmel. And then, like us, you’ll go “Bloody hell! That’s the sticky toffee pudding shop from Rick Stein’s Food Heroes programme!!!”

And you will buy an armful of puddings from them. And then you will eat them. And you will be sore amazed.

If you’re a bit of an obsessive, you will then start to look up recipes, including the great M. Stein’s. And you will add them together and throw your own little twists and idiosyncrasies. Following which, you will post them on the Internet so that cardiologists everywhere will still be able to afford their golf club memberships...

Ingredients

Pudding

• 150g dates, stoned and finely chopped
• 250ml water
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 50g soft butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 200g plain flour, sifted
• 1 heaped tsp baking powder

Toffee sauce

• 250ml double cream
• 200g muscovado sugar
• 100g butter
• 2 tbsp date syrup (dibs)

To serve

• 200ml whipped cream
• 1 tbsp brandy
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Butter a bread tin and line it with greaseproof paper. Crank the oven up to GM4/180C/350F. Roll your sleeves up.

Add the chopped dates, water, vanilla and bicarbonate together in a pan and boil them. Take the mixture off the heat and put it to one side.

Cream the butter and sugar in a roomy bowl, beating it until it pales. Beat one of the eggs with a fork in a small bowl and add this, slowly and beating constantly, to the creamed sugar. There’s a danger of curdling here, so do take care and take it nice and slow. Now throw in a tablespoon of the flour and mix it in well before adding a second pre-beaten egg. Sift the rest of the flour with the baking powder and then add these to the egg mixture, folding it as gently as you can, thinking beautiful thoughts about bunny rabbits and laughing children. I find that thoughts of Kate Bush also are a good thing at this stage, but chaque a son goute, habibi as we say in Beirut and parts of Al Wahda Street.

Reheat the date and water mixture, then add it to the mix in the bowl and mix it in with a wooden spoon. Pour the whole bally lot into the bread tin and bake for a good 35-40 minutes, testing it with a bamboo skewer in the middle to ensure that it has set well. If the skewer comes out clean, you’re good. By all means, give it an extra five minutes to be sure. Leave the pudding to cool a little, then turn it out onto a plate.

Whip the cream, brandy and vanilla essence until it’s all stiffened up and chuck it into the fridge.
For the toffee sauce, heat the cream, sugar, date syrup and butter together in a pan until it all melts up. Reserve this.

When you’re almost ready to serve the pudding, slice it in nice, thick, generous wodges and put the slices to heat in a low oven, together with the serving plates. Re-heat the sauce then pour this over each slice, adding a goodly dollop of cream mixture and an artistic twizzle of date syrup.

Now go and see a reputable cardiologist and say "Hi, I'd like an ECG." Then you can't blame us for any collateral damage...

Fruit and Marshmallow Kebabs

Ingredients

• Firm, chunky fruit - pineapple, mango, strawberries etc
• Marshmallows
• Garam massala powder
• Date honey
• Freshly squeezed orange juice

Cut fruit into bite-sized chunks, combine marinade ingredients, mix everything together and leave covered in a cool place for an hour or two to let the flavours marry. Thread fruit and marshmallows onto soaked bamboo skewers

Grill over a medium to hot barbecue, and serve with copious amounts of spray-on cream.

Guest barbecue guru: EyeOnDubai

Stuffed Chocolate Bananas

Ingredients

• Firm (barely ripe) bananas

• Good quality dark chocolate

Cut a small slit in the top surface of each banana, insert two or three squares of good quality dark chocolate, then wrap each banana in tinfoil. Bake on a medium grill for 20 minutes until the banana is hot and the chocolate melted.

Adults may add a teaspoon of Caribbean island liqueur (if liked), best eaten with fingers and too much spray-can cream!

Guest barbecue guru: EyeOnDubai

Pancakes

Shrove Tuesday is the last day before the beginning of Lent, the Christian fasting season, so it was traditionally a time when the richness in the larder was emptied in preparation for the fast. Over the years this has become pancake day in the UK: a day in which rich little omeletty waffles of eggs, flour, butter and milk are fried up and served with a squeeze of lemon and frosted with scatterings of sugar.

Amazingly, in the Levant, Christian families still take Lent seriously. I’m talking really, truly, Ramadan style seriously. None of this giving up something convenient like chocolate or prawn cracker flavour crisps for Lent stuff: we’re talking no meat, no richness, no booze, no nothing nice kind of fasting. Because, of course, that is the true intention of the fast of Lent.

The English Pancake is a close (if sniffy) cousin to the French crêpe: it’s poured into a hot pan of buttered fat to bubble up in a thin, albeit slightly less obsessively thin than the French, layer of richness. The Americans prefer to create something wodgy, thick and all too much like a crumpet for us ‘old world’ folk.

The trick to this is a decent batter, a rightly warm pan (crisply hot, but not over-sizzly: you’re looking to cook the batter smoothly and briskly and yet not have it bubble up or blacken beyond redemption: brown around the edges and marbled with brownness is good) and a measure of fat in the pan that supports a brisk slide and toss, because pancakes have to be tossed. The higher up in the air the better. For no particular culinary reason: it's just more fun that way.

Ingredients

• 125g plain flour
• 300ml gold top milk
• 50ml water
• 15g caster sugar
• A good pinch of sea salt
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 50g butter
• A bottle of decent oil: groundnut is good

Sift the flour into a roomy bowl, adding the sugar and salt. Slide the beaten eggs into the middle and then whisk the eggs, salt, sugar and flour together. Add the milk and water slowly to form a dough and then, as more liquid joins the floury concoction, a batter, beating out any lurking lumps or other unscheduled irregularities as you wield your whisk of choice. Add the vanilla and leave it to stand, the longer the better: an hour is great if you give it a quick stir up before you use it again.

A good quality, small non-stick saucepan is best for this. Melt a small knob of butter together with a splash of groundnut oil in the pan. Now ladle a spoon of mixture into the centre, twisting the pan to spread the mixture around. You’re looking to create a thin layer of cooking batter on the base of the pan and it’ll take a couple of tries to get the quantity right as you acclimatise to the cooking temperature and amount of oil. A great pancake is created from a uniformly thin spread of batter on the pan. Let it cook, don’t be hasty, and give it the occasional nudge to see if the pancake is moveable: even lift the edges a little with a silicon or wooden spatula. You’re looking at a minute or two at the absolute most for a reasonably thin pancake over a lively medium heat. When the time is right, the pancake will move in the pan when you nudge it. Now you go for the mad spin into the unknown that excites the hot blooded, insane spirit inside you. You toss the pancake.

This is a forward movement performed together with an upward flick that sends the pancake flying into the air in a glorious back-flip trajectory. Time it right, move the pan to meet the descending confection and you’ve got yourself a perfect pancake cooking on the other side like a cooking pancake thing. Get it wrong and you’ve got a mess in a pan, a mess on the cooker or, even worse, a mess on the wall, ceiling or even cook.

Keep trying, it’s worth it.

Once the whole tossing thing is mastered (and yes, I did master being a tosser many years ago, thank you), you can cook the other side of the pancake for a minute or so. Slide it onto a plate and use greaseproof to divide the pancakes and you can freeze them, keep them, reheat them or whatever. But there’s nothing in the world quite so nice as sliding that freshly cooked pancake onto a warm plate with a spoon of caster sugar and a squeeze of lemon and then cooking the next as the last pancake disappears!

Do what you want with them. Serve them plain with sugar and lemon, add chocolate, cream, strawberries or mango. Add all three if you like. Whoosh a squoosh of brandy into the pan and set fire to it or just layer them with cream and banana cooked in rum and vanilla, orange segments and cointreau (in which case you can call 'em Crêpes Suzette and be all posh like) or cherries steeped in kirsch. Suit yourself, in short.

But do have a great, laughing, stupid time of it – ideally with family and friends joining in!

Christmas Pudding

It’s time to make the Christmas pudding!!! Actually, it’s a little late if anything but the barbecue thing got in the way for the past couple of weeks… So cancel your plans for next weekend and stay in to make this recipe instead. It’s a bit of a mission, will require at least one special trip to the shops as well as a desperate plea for help to 7Days’ shopping guru Ingrid Howell-Jones when you realise that Spinneys don’t sell butter muslin (but why would a specialist expatriate supermarket sell ingredients and equipment essential to Christmas after decades of experience serving homesick émigrés?) and means staying in for at least a day but it’s all well worth it, believe me. This, then, really is a traditional recipe from back in the days when people had the time to truly invest in food and didn't spend the time messing about with blogs and things...

Making the pudding isn’t the end of the story, though. It’s like a food tamagotchi - feed it, nurture it and leave it lurking like a forgotten dipsomaniac in a corner of the ‘fridge for the next couple of months and you’ll have the perfect finish to your Christmas day. Or you could always boil that pathetic little blob of cheap fat and breadcrumbs that came in the hamper from Aunty Doreen in Stroud…

No. Don’t do it. Cook this and take my earnest counsel: this is the only way.

My dad always calls this ‘plum duff’ much to my mum’s horror. She takes her food seriously does mum and the very idea of calling a carefully assembled mixture of the very best the world can offer cooked up lovingly and then fed with plentiful high quality hooch for months, if not years, a ‘plum duff’ is fundamentally horrific for her. Which, of course, is precisely why he calls it ‘plum duff’.

So here is Ma’s Plum Duff. This recipe has been tested to keep, properly ‘fed’, for five years. And yes, the end result five years later is a remarkable experience!

Oh! This makes two puddings, each one litre (ie: it fills a 2 pint, or 1 litre, pudding basin). Why? One for this year, one to keep for next year or the year after! You can always make up one pudding by halving the ingredients.

You’ll also need string, greaseproof paper and plenty of good quality butter muslin, two roomy pans and some tinfoil. You’ll need to make this at the weekend as it takes two days (one to make the mix and leave it settle, one to boil the puddings).

Doddle, eh?

Ingredients

• 250g sultanas
• 250g currants
• 1 carrot, grated
• 1 apple, grated
• 125g candied mixed peel, chopped
• 60g chopped almonds
• 1 lemon, zest and juice
• 1 orange, zest and juice
• 125 g self raising flour
• 250g bread crumbs
• 250g suet
• ½ tsp grated nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 350g muscovado or demerara sugar
• 2 tbsp date syrup or treacle
• 4 tbsp brandy
• 3 large fresh eggs, whisked
• 500ml Irish stout or good brown ale

Sift the flour and spices into very large bowl then add the suet (you can use vegetable suet, by the way!), breadcrumbs, sugar, sultanas, raisins, candied peel and the fruit zest and then give it all a good mix. Warm the date syrup or treacle slightly until it’s runny, add the stout and the spirit and then pour it over the dry mix. Give this a stir around then mix in the eggs and the fruit juice and give it all a stiff mixing. When I was a kid, for some reason, at this stage everyone in the house was press-ganged into having a mix of the pudding for good luck or some such mumbo jumbo, but you might like to just walk around the mixture seven times widdershins and kill a black cockerel instead.

Cover the mixture with a cloth and leave in the fridge overnight.

A day later, it’s time to mess about with greaseproof paper, muslin and string. Butter two pudding basins well and spoon in the mixture, dividing it equally between the two (da). Cover each pudding with a double layer of greaseproof paper (you can do it with sloppy folding or you can carefully cut circles using the pudding basin as a template, depending on whether you're a human being or Delia Smith) and then top this with butter muslin, which you need to tie down tight over the lip of the basin with string. The smart trick is to tie this up with a loop in it so that you can stably lift the basin by the string - this makes lifting it into and out of pans of boiling water a great deal easier. Trim any bits and pieces of muslin that are sticking out, hanging down or just generally surplus to requirements.

Make two pads about 1/2cm thick by folding layers of tinfoil, slightly larger than the base of the basins so that they can sit on them and place these in the base of two large, roomy pans and put the basins on top (alternatively, you can use an old upended saucer – the idea’s to keep the basins from contacting the floor of the pan). Pour a kettle of boiling water around (not over!) each pudding until it’s almost to the lip of the basin and then place them on a low to medium heat to simmer, covered, for a good six hours. You’ll need to top up the water every now and then: don’t just leave it or it’ll boil dry. Alternatively, of course you can make the puddings in relays if you’ve only got the one pan.

Remove the puddings to cool and, when they’re quite cold (probably the next morning), remove the muslin and greaseproof and stab holes all over it. Spoon in as much brandy as you like and then cover with clean greaseproof and muslin. I can’t be bothered to tie it again at this stage and just use masking tape, by the way. Now push it into the ‘fridge to lurk drunkenly in a corner. Every week or two, take it out and top it up with brandy by repeating the stabbing trick. At the last, tie it properly to steam it on the day – you’ll need to do the whole roomy pan/tinfoil pad thing again and it needs to steam for a solid two hours.

You’ll also need to make a crucial decision – whether to serve the pudding ‘au naturel’, with Crème Anglais or custard or indeed with brandy butter as an accompaniment. I’ll try and remember to post up the relevant recipes before Christmas!

When the pudding’s cooked, you need to remove the coverings and upend it on a warmed roomy plate or dish, then pour over a couple of slugs of brandy (or rum) over it before setting light to it and bringing it triumphally to the specially darkened dining table. Do try not to set fire to yourself as we don’t give refunds here at The Fat Expat…