Plum Pudding

I love Plum Pudding. This is a little odd, because mostly I don't like fruit cakes or fruit puddings or anything that has orange rind and sultanas cooked into it. But I love the tradition that goes with pudding.

Most years my Mum makes one and everyone stirs the mixture once, making a wish for the new year. I'm not quite sure why Jane is so grumpy in this photo - but it's one of the few that we have of all four girls mixing the pudding and making their wishes.

I'm pleased to say that the tradition is not dying out - this year the next generation learnt about stiring the pudding and making a wish for the new year.

But some of the best traditions are on Christmas day. The pudding is brought to the table with a halo of purple flames, having been doused in hot Brandy. Charles Dickens even has something to say about plum pudding in A Christmas Carol.

"Mrs Cratchit left the room alone -- too nervous to bear witnesses -- to take the pudding up and bring it in... 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."

Found on Wiki.

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you have a great couple of days and I'll see you all on the other side of the New Year!