How to make Christmas puddings... in a slow cooker!

I love my slow cooker.

On my list of favourite things in the world, it's right up there with my husband and the Pope (maybe 'things' sounds wrong...).

So when it came to making this year's Christmas puds it crossed my mind that a slow cooker would actually be a rather splendid way of steaming the puddings. I haven't actually done an energy comparison (though I will...) but it strikes me that when boiling a pan of water for about 6 hours, the slow cooker is going to come out on top.

Unlike our Christmas cake, I don't have a family recipe for Xmas puds. But unlike our Christmas cake, a pudding needs to be somewhat less precise in measurements. Rarely do I have everything I need, even if I've done shopping 'specially, so this is just as well.

Surveying some of the big cheeses in the culinary world I did of course create a spreadsheet of quantities of ingredients used, so that I could compare, and find an average. The quantities are for a 1.2 L pudding, serving 6-8 people.

As you can see, for all and every, they're very similar, and don't vary much from the quintessential Victorian Householder, Mrs. Beeton.

The type of fat used varies - be it butter, oil or suet. The quantity and type of booze also varies quite a lot (blimey, Nigella!) varying from stout to brandy to a rather tame sub with milk by Jamie Oliver. But the principle is the same: 100 g each of breadcrumbs, flour, fat and sugar; 500 g dried fruit (whatever you fancy: I used raisins, sultanas, apricots, dates and figs); about 150 ml stout/liquid; 2 eggs; as much spice as you like, and a grated apple. Nuts seemed very optional.

I then divvied this up into one big and 6 tiddly pudding basins (the large one actually just being a leftover container from a past pud...), put about an inch of water in the bottom of my slow cooker, and switched it on low for about 6 hours. Better safe than sorry - and I figure it's practically impossible to over-steam a pudding over this time frame!

Raw pud mixture in my teeny basins

Et voila - no worrying about the pan boiling dry, very little effort (compared to the cake), and a pudding that tastes infinitely better than those shop-bought stodge-fests.

I seriously recommend trying to make your own (if, of course you like Christmas pudding!), I couldn't believe the difference the first time I made my own. It was AWESOME!

Cooked puds - and cakes!