Christmas Ammunition!

The cannonball run-up to Christmas has started. :) I cooked one of my puddings in an ice-cream bombe mould I last used in 2002 for my granddaughter's birthday. We celebrated it in our potting-shed, up to our eyes in plants, with all our nursery staff. April was very hot that year.

I'm going to wrap the pudding in a muslin when I boil it on Christmas day hoping to channel a bit of this:

"Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top."

I remember that smell. My paternal grandmother used to make a suet pudding with raisins in it called a spotted dog. That was boiled in floured pudding-cloth.

My pudding isn't hard and firm like Mrs Cratchit's. The Josceline Dimbleby recipe I use has no sugar, treacle or syrup and no flour. It's surprisingly light. I've made one in a basin to send to my son in Spain.