How I Ruined My Christmas Pudding
I have been baking for a while and started a food blog recently, in a desperate attempt to remember recipes. I don’t bake professionally and find wearing my chef hat on Sundays, oddly meditative. My fondest memory of cooking for the holidays run many a years back, when I attempted making a traditional Christmas pudding. Nigella Lawson’s being the closest inspiration possible.
Every year we invite family and friends over, for a special holiday lunch. Unfortunately, as most home cooks in Kolkata would understand, baking requires a lot of precision and procuring right ingredients or measuring apparatuses was quite the challenge. The idea of steaming a pudding for hours in a hot water basin was daunting. I would rather pop the dish in an oven and be done with it.
Without enough experience underneath my hat, hell was about to break loose. I clearly remember mixing up a lot of ingredients as the jars in the pantry were not labeled. Instead of using allspice, I incorporated espresso powder. Without a proper grater, I added a lot of orange pith along with the zest, inadvertently making the pudding a little bitter. I did not have a hand blender back then and had the hardest time whisking the butter (which refused to thaw) and sugar together. I did a shoddy job breaking the eggs. Thank heavens I had enough sense not to accidentally add broken egg shells to this gigantic mess. With brown sugar still unavailable in a lot of markets, I had added chunky pieces of jaggery to compensate.
Instead of using a pudding basin, I used an almost flat casserole dish which did not give me the desired shape or texture. I burnt my finger trying to transfer the dish into the water bath and the pudding took me hours to cook due to my inefficiency in properly sealing the casserole dish with an aluminum foil. I was on all fours praying that the pudding be ready before the guests arrived. Later, when people praised the coffee flavour infused, I had the hardest time realizing what had gone wrong or in my case, right!
My botched attempt at making the dessert all those years back stands as one of my most memorable holiday anecdotes. Thankfully, those days are in the past. A lot of amateur bakers might be able to identify with this tale. For a lot of us, failed attempts and licking the dough off the spatula has been a way of growing up! This year, I will make the Christmas pudding, again. Maybe, with that dash of coffee, to indulge in some warm Christmas nostalgia.