English Plum Pudding aka Christmas Pudding is one of those super delicious, super impressive and super easy desserts. To Americans, the name can be fairly confusing because its not a pudding, its a cake…and there are no plums in it. You see, in England, pudding is a generic word for all sorts of dessert, and this particular dessert has undoubtedly been made many ways over the decades. Did it contain plums? Maybe. Or more likely plum refers to the raisins.
The first time I tasted plum pudding, I thought “where have you been my whole life?” I was already full of Christmas food and I was just going to have a sliver…you know… for the experience. Next thing I know, I’ve eaten an entire piece. No regrets.
So let me tell you why this cake is so freakin’ fantastic.
- First off, its incredibly moist, like crazy moist.
- Second, the flavor is intense and complex. Each bite is an experience.
- Third, its special. In England, Christmas Pudding is widely available. However, in the United States, it’s near impossible to find this dessert. It won’t be at your local bakery or on a restaurant menu. Homemade is really the only option.
- Fourth, you set it on fire before you eat it. How fun is that?
And yet, for some of you, I know that this dessert is a hard sell. After all, let’s be honest. This is a fruit cake. There, I said it. And I’m going to say some more. It is better after it ages. And it has raisins in it…lots of raisins. And for many people I know, that’s a deal killer right there. When did the raisin fall out of favor anyway? But I digress. I’m asking you to set all that aside and put a little faith in me and Christmas and give this unique dessert a try.
I am posting this 14 days before the big day, but if you want to make your own plum pudding, hurry up. Unfortunately, it may already be too late, if you can believe that. Here’s why. Plum pudding, like all fruit cakes, improves over time. I’ve heard stories of cakes made one year for consumption in the next. So if you want plum pudding for Christmas, you should make it yesterday, but no later than one week before Christmas so head to the store.
Adapted from a recipe by the fabulous and sainted Julia Child
CAKE
- 3 cups packed coarse fresh breadcrumbs from white bread (aka 1/2 lb. loaf, crusts on). I use Pepperidge Farm.
- 1 cup dark raisins
- 1 cup golden raisins
- 1 cup currants
- 1 1/3 cup sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon mace
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
- 1/2 lb (2 sticks) melted unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 4 large eggs
- a few drops of almond extract
- 1/2 cup bitter orange marmalade
- 1/2 cup bourbon or dark rum
HARD SAUCE
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 10 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 2 tablespoons brandy or cognac
THE BIG FINALE
- 1/2 to 1 cup rum (or brandy) to flambé
SPECIALTY EQUIPMENT: 8-cup capacity Steamed Pudding Mold & small rack that fits into a tall stockpot. If you don’t have a steamed pudding mold, you can use a small bowl, but a pudding mold is inexpensive and pretty easy to find at a kitchen store or online. You will also need a small rack to keep the mold off the bottom of the pot. I struggled with this for years until I finally found a small rack like this one in an Asian Supermarket. Whatever you devise, your goal is to keep the metal of the pudding mold (or bowl) from making contact with the very hot metal stockpot bottom. Instead, you want the water to surround the bottom of the mold while it steams.
Tear bread into pieces and place in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse to form rough crumbs. Empty the crumbs into very large bowl.
SIDE NOTE: Obviously this cake was made long before the invention of the food processor and you could chop all this by hand, but processing is soooo much easier.
Turn the fruit out into the bowl with the bread. Put all of the other ingredients into the food processor and pulse to mix.
Butter an 8-cup capacity steamed pudding mold (or medium-size bowl). Pack pudding into mold and top with a parchment round on surface.
Cover tightly either with the lid on the mold or with a plate and/or aluminum foil.
Do some laundry, watch some TV, check your blog. Go for a walk around the block even. Just check from time to time to make sure that your water has not evaporated below the 1/3 full level and add more if it does.MANY WEEKS LATER…
NOTE: Make sure that both the cake and the booze are pretty warm/hot or the flambe probably won’t light.
WARNING: Make sure that the person in charge of the flambe isn’t also lit. This is fire after all and someone who is a little drunk on the Xmas spirits might accidentally set their kitchen counter on fire…Yes, that was me. Oops.
GORGEOUS! This is one of my fathers favorites from childhood.
Can I use a “tamales” pot to steam the pudding? the pot has a perforated lid that is set at a few inches from the bottom, then you set the Tamales on it to steam.
That might work really well, but I would still recommend filling the tamale pot such that the water came 1/3 of the way up the steamed pudding mold. That would mean that the perforated lid that sits in the bottom would also be completely submerged. Thanks for the suggestion. I may need to get a tamale pot now.
I just made one of these – my third! My wife is an Anglofile and kept getting the “Crosse and Blackwell” canned puddings. (I suppose they’ll due in a pinch.) I used the recipe from an old Fannie Farmer cook book. Used suet instead of butter. This thing is gorgeous and MUCH better than the commercial variety. The whole house smells good!!! I can hardly wait to eat it.
Wonderful end to a special Christmas dinner. Next year I will use little less brandy to flambe. My dish was not deep enough and spilled over on the tablecloth. Might have been tragic but husband snuffed it out. All in all fun and delicious.
Hi Kristi,
Your post made me laugh. I also had a small flambe incident when the flame spilled over onto my kitchen counter. I blew out that part of the flame and the counter was unharmed. Next year, perhaps a little less wine before I start playing with fire. 🙂 Merry Christmas!
— Heather
Love this pudding recipe, thanks
Traditional Christmas Pudding Recipes
I love plum pudding. I am half british and I loved it as a little girl when my grandmother made it. Thank you for the recipe.
How many does it serve?
Well…that depends in part on the people and whether or not they just ate a big holiday meal right before. This is a very rich dessert, so when I serve it the pudding goes a long way. It would serve a minimum of 10. However, we end up slicing it quite thinly and so we have served as many as 16. It also makes excellent post Holiday treat leftovers and keeps a really long time as long as you keep it tightly wrapped in plastic. Best, H
What do you serve it in. I always use a rather unattractive glass/pyrex baking dish because I am afraid that if I light it on a non-tempered dish, the plate might break… I don’t know where to go for a pretty tempered serving dish… Any thoughts??
Gosh. I really don’t know. I always use one of my everyday plates. Haven’t broken one yet. 😉 – Heather
okay–maybe I am being overly cautious… Thanks
Thank you! We have Christmas Pudding on Christmas Day and leftovers on the Feast of Epiphany…Jan 6. Well this year no leftovers for the 3 Kings. So I searched for a new recipe after 27 years and found yours. Again thank you…it was just perfect. Moist, tasty and came out so beautifully from the mold. This now my “new tradition” Plum Pudding!
We used your recipe last Christmas. It is delicious. Thank you for sharing it.
Thank-you for this recipe, I have my great great grandmothers recipe which is very similar but over the years (well over a hundred) the cooking instructions have been lost, so now I am going to try my recipe using your cooking instructions……fingers crossed
If I half all the ingredients to make a smaller batch, would I steam it less time?
Thanx
Hi Erika,
That is a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer. It seems logical that if you were to make a smaller amount, it would take less time to steam, but I think that would depend on the shape of the vessel that you were to cook it in. My pudding mold is a lot like a tall bundt pan. There is a hole in the center. If you were to fill the same pan with half of the batter, it would almost certainly cook faster. However, if you were to steam your half-size pudding in a tall bowl with no hole in the center, it would still probably steam faster, but not 50% faster. Batter steamed in a shallow bowl would probably cook quite quickly indeed. You would need to watch it to see when it was solid all the way through. If you try it, let me know how it turns out. Best, H
Wow…this cake sounds amazing! I would love to try it for Christmas this year, but it would be impossible for me to get hold of a steaming dish (I’m in India). Is there any way this pudding can be baked, and if so, for how much time and at what temperature. Pleeeaaase do let me know!!! Thanks 🙂
Hi Neetu,
If you can’t find the official pudding tin with a lid, you can substitute any heatproof bowl. Cover it tightly with tin foil and steam in a large pot according to the recipe. The final cake would be a different shape, but that’s OK.
Regarding baking in the oven, I’ve never tried it. I fear that it would result in a dry cake. Still, if you do decide to go this route, I would cover the baking dish with tin foil and bake in a 350 degree oven until cooked through (not sure how long this would be). In order to help prevent drying, consider placing a large pan filled with water in another part of the oven to keep the air inside moist.
Whatever you decide, please drop me a note or send me a picture if you can. I’d love to know how it turns out!
Merry Christmas,
Heather
Hi Heather,
Tried making the pudding as you suggested, and it really turned out fabulous!! I’m a home baker, just starting to get my fingers dusted with flour(!) and this was my first for any kind of pudding…the flavour of the cake was awesome and it was indeed, very, very moist. The recipe seemed quite daunting, but when it actually came down to making it, turned out quite simple to make. Thanks for a great recipe…it’s a sure keeper 🙂
Hope you had a wonderful christmas…happy new year!!
Neetu
My English grandmother would make plum pudding for Christmas nearly every year. But she did not bake it. She cooked it on the stove and then spooned it into cheesecloth and hung it in the cellar for months and months. What resulted was a ball of extremely dense fruitcake that, when sliced very, very thin, was the best thing you ever ate.
I want to learn how your grandmother kept the pudding for months and months, ……do you remember any more details?
Thank you,
Jeanine
I know this is really late… but it was soaked in alcohol – usually brandy, rum, or even port or sherry, depending on what you could get at the time.
I am currently steaming a pudding made from this recipe. One taste of the batter transported me back to childhood days of eating Cross & Blackwell pudding for Christmas dessert. Thank you for helping me bring back a much-missed family tradition. Fingers crossed that the final product is just as tasty!
can you make this the day of serving? most of the recipes including yours call for it to be made several weeks in advance.
Alexander, I think it does need at least a few days to fully develop it’s flavor. Having said that, I’ve never tried it the day of serving. Maybe it is just fine. If you try it, let me know. – H
My grandmother always had plum pudding at Christmas and it has always been a favorite holiday treat. I use to be able to get R&R plumb pudding a t our local shop, but not any more. I was so excited to find your recipe. I was wondering, when it’s made a month or more in advance do you continue to add rum once a week, and if so how much?
Thanks for your help.
I keep it in the tin with the parchment paper on the pudding and the lid on top and store it in the fridge. Done and done. I don’t add anything extra (no extra rum) until the day I serve it (the hard sauce, flambe and all that) 🙂 It stays super moist that way.
I’ve been trying to track down a perfect traditional plum pudding recipe for months, and just took the plunge with yours – it’s steaming now! I have a dear friend who has many childhood memories of traditional plum pudding with his family, and can’t wait to surprise him with this one in a month…the directions – including photos – were perfect and very easy to follow. The tone of this whole recipe was completely delightful! thanks for a lovely afternoon, and for a kitchen that smells pretty amazing already… I’ll let you know how it turns out at Christmas.
M
isnt the hard sauce missing the heavy cream?
This will be my second year making this recipe. The best! My parents and siblings loved it!! The first one I realized I forgot the sugar, so there went the second one in the pot the fallowing day. Believe it or not most of us liked the one without the sugar. So I’m making this years without sugar. Thanks for bringing this family tradition back! Andrew
How is it that kids today don’t absolutely love plum pudding??? It is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don’t get it. Anyway that just means more for me!!!
I love this post, it made my husband and me cry with laughter. We are in England and the bit about setting it on fire was tremendous, I am still giggling. It’s not until people in another land write about things you take for granted that you see it in such a different way. If you want any more information about Christmas pudding making please do feel free to get in touch, I wish I had a pound for every one I’ve made! They are really a delicious treat, and we never eat them except on Christmas Day, and everyone has some after the turkey, roast potatoes, sprouts, sausages wrapped in bacon, carrots, peas, sage and onion stuffing, and turkey gravy. It’s no wonder we can hardly move from the dining table to the settee.
My Ancestry profile says I am more British than the British.
This could be true as I have been pining for The British Isles since I read about them in the Britannica as a child and, of course, when the Beatles appeared.
I even adopted an English accent to entertain my parents and their friends. We had lots of laughs, nearly hysterics from parent’s friends.
As an Anglophile I just can’t get enough of England. I can’t wait to go back.
This recipe looks great and am delighted you put it on line. : )
How can you serve it warm ehen you’re not serving it in your own home? Does HAVE to be warm to flambe it? How long does it stay warm?
You can pop the pudding onto a microwave-safe dish and heat it up that way. It might be possible to flambe it cold, but when I have tried, I was not successful. It just needs to stay warm for the flambe. Once the flames dye down, you can eat it room temperature. It’s yummy that way.
I just finished my last small Christmas Pudding this week I make my puddings in small deep bowls, the pudding being wrapped in muslim and tied at the top. I always make and steam my puddings second week of October each year. For the sauce I buy Birds Custard, mix it with milk and boil. Leave it for five minutes then pour over your individual piece ofpudding. At least I have been doing this for 65 years and never had a complaint.
With great respect, I don’t mean to sound picky, but Christmas pudding is not a cake. In the British Isles we have both Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. They are similar but two distinct and separate items with separate recipes and cooking methods. Most households will have both, the pudding eaten as dessert after Christmas dinner and the cake being served at tea time in the late afternoon/early evening.
Although it’s true that the term ‘pudding’ can be used for any dessert, Christmas pudding belongs to the very old British tradition of boiled suet puddings. I notice this recipe doesn’t contain any suet and purists would say that it’s not possible to make a ‘real’ Christmas pudding without it. Suet is the fat from around the kidneys of the cow and it has a very distinctive flavour but it also lends a specific texture to the classic Christmas pud. Suet puddings can be either sweet or savoury and indeed Christmas pudding itself evolved from a meat pudding which was flavoured with sugar and spices!
I will try this recipe. My grandparents were British. My grandfather was a Scotsman, and my grandmother was from Northern Ireland. She made a Christmas pudding every year along with mincemeat pies. She put suet in both mixtures and she always asked the butcher to give her “the crumbly fat from around the kidneys. Her steaming method was a little different than those discussed here. She always tied the pudding mixture up very tightly in cotton muslin to form a ball. Then she would invert a medium sized bowl in the bottom of a deep stockpot. She would set the pudding ball on the bottom of the inverted bowl and put water in the pot so that it came up to the bottom of the pudding. Then she’d put the lid on the stockpot and steam the pudding for several hours. She always had the tea kettle going on the side to add boiling water to the stockpot and keep the water level up where it should be. The entire house would be filled with the aromas of the spices, the fruit, and the whiskey in the pudding. She used Bourbon whiskey in the pudding and the hard sauce. I suppose adjustments were made to the recipe when they came to America. There were also shiny new dimes wrapped in waxed paper inside the pudding for all the kids at the table. At the end of our Christmas dinner she would pour some heated Bourbon over the pudding and light it with a match, and when she brought it to the table my grandfather would always say, “here comes the flamin’ cannon ball!” And it did look like a flaming cannon ball with blue flames leaping all around it, it was so exciting for us kids. None of us learned the recipe from her, and when she died she took it with her. I am 68 years old, and I have searched most of my life for a good Christmas pudding recipe. This Christmas I will make this recipe and maybe my grand nieces and nephews will have something close to the experience I had as a kid. I hope so.
Can we bake the cake instead of steaming it for six hours?
I’m afraid not. Steaming is essential.
When we serve Christmas pudding, we do it the “Dickens” way. Before steaming, we insert small objects in it, each of which have a meaning ….. a coin for wealth, a ring for love or marriage, a thimble for health, a button for happiness. After flaming, the pudding is served and the objects are found randomly by the guests (we servers sometimes know where a particular object is going to a particular person for fun), and the guests eat very carefully searching as they eat. If the objects are very small ( like a sixpence) they are best wrapped in foil and of course guests are warned beforehand. This makes for a jolly good time. We also make our hard sauce with dark rum.
When I was a young girl (and I’m ancient) my grandma used to make a steamed pudding made with raisins and prunes. It was lovely and moist and she served it with a hot vanilla sauce. I suspect the prunes were what was referred to when this was called plum pudding. Since plums only grow in summer its logical that they were dried prunes by the time the Christmas season came around.
Hello Heather . I am, for The first time in my life (I am 66 years old), trying to make a Christmas Pudding. It is in bowl right now… Steaming 😊.
But I am not sure about what to do with the cake, when it is done.
Shall it stay in the bowl or is it meant to be tanken out and placed on plate ?
Kind regards
Doris Christiansen
I usually keep it in the tin until right before serving. Just wrap it well with plastic wrap. Alternatively, if you did put it on a plate, wrap tightly with plastic and keep in the fridge until you serve. VERY IMPORTANT! Remember to heat up the cake again before you ignite it. 🙂