Perfect ‘Stir Up Sunday’ to make tasty Christmas pudding

The date varies each year, but it is always the last Sunday before Advent.

The words “stir up” come from the bible but the Christmas pudding itself is said to have been introduced to us by Prince Albert, along with the Christmas tree.

The tradition is that families gather in the kitchen to mix and steam the pudding, each person making a wish as they take a turn with the mixing spoon. When I was a child, we had the extra excitement of hiding a few coins in the pudding and then anticipating who would be lucky and find one in the pudding on Christmas day.

Another memory is of my Dad setting the pudding on fire, least wise that’s what I thought he was doing. Just before serving it’s traditional to heat a ladle of spirit up, set it alight and then pour it over the pudding, such drama indeed! The final conundrum is, what should be poured over the pudding? So many choices, brandy sauce, rum sauce, custard, brandy butter! The very last tradition in our family was to save the pudding until after the Queen’s speech on television.

Of course, many of us buy a pudding nowadays, and with so many people having a microwave at home the hours of steaming on Christmas morning to reheat it is a thing of the past.

The pudding still requires hours of steaming over a pan of water on stir up Sunday though, or does it? This year with cost of energy being sky high I have been cooking every conceivable thing in my slow cooker, so I thought, why not the Christmas pudding too?

I looked online and there are several recipes that use the slow cooker. I used BBC Good Food but added a few extras of my own. The recipe asked for suet, but I used grated butter as I was out of suet. I added glace cherries and lots of chopped nuts and lots more booze than the recipe suggested. I cooked the pudding on low in the slow cooker for about eight hours, as it cooked it started to smell like Christmas and the finished pudding looks exactly as it should. Now it is in the back of a dark cupboard and will stay there until Christmas day when it will be reheated in, yes, you guessed it, the slow cooker!