Nine years ago I wrote a post on my first experience making my own Christmas Pudding at home, just like my mum used to make them. I haven’t been bothered to make my own for a few years now, especially since they are easier to find these days in Finland. Like I wrote in my 2009 post, they should be steamed for up to 6 hours, which is A Bother. This year my wife and I made them ourselves again, but it turned out we had made twice the amount of pudding mixture required to fill the two Pyrex bowls we had bought specially for them. My wife then had an excellent idea: let’s make pudding cupcakes!

The mixture was plenty to make 12 little puddings in a muffin tray. Obviously I couldn’t steam them in the tray, so I just baked them normally in the oven. They turned out excellent, although initially much harder on the outside compared to a steamed pudding. After a few days in the fridge though, they had softened and the flavour improved, and honestly I couldn’t tell much difference between the cupcakes and a steamed-for-6-hours variety.

Next year I’m going to skip the steaming bit and just bake the whole big pudding in the oven on low heat to see what happens. It’s traditional to soak a christmas pudding with brandy or rum afterwards anyway so I don’t see how I could really ruin it, not counting the insult to centuries of British steaming tradition…