Just before my work started, I prepared some dried fruit in alcolhol (lots of alcohol) and put it in the fridge to soak. I was making two Creole Cakes (a la Delia), one for us and one for a friend. Delia says to soak the fruit for a week, but I find three weeks with an extra dosing of alcohol at the end of the second week works well.
I managed to get the cakes made one day when I needed a break from work, and I was very pleased to be working to schedule. I don't dress them until December and so they are stored, wrapped in greasproof and foil, in an airtight container in a cool dark place.
I also had three iced cakes to make and some puddings. On Wednesday last week, I soaked fruit in brandy for the cakes, and made up christmas puddings mixture. I made the cakes on Thursday, they are wrapped and stored, and will be fed with brandy over the next 3 weeks.
While the cakes were in the oven, I put the pudding mix into basins and covered and tied them all. This was the first year where I had managed to get all the right sized basins beforehand.
Modern basins are slighly larger than 1pt/2pt. At least, they are if you fill them to the top and, as the puddings shrink anyway, it seems rude not to. I usually find I don't have quite enough mixture, so I made a little extra this time. I made a bit more "extr"a than I thought, so not only were all pudding basins filled, but I needed to go up from a 3/4 pint to a 1 pint basin for us.
On Friday lunchtime, I set the puddings to steam for 8 hours. It was relatively painless. When they were done, I set them on cooling racks overnight. First thing Saturday, I took the foil and papers off the now-cold basins, cleaned them up, and re-dressed them. I even wrapped them in cellophane, which I don't normally do until December. Still on schedule.
As I was admiring my cellophaned handiwork, I realised a friend had asked me to make an individual sized pudding, and I had forgotten. I looked at our own pudding, which was probably an individual-sized pudding larger than it needed to be and rolled my eyes at myself.
I'll need to get some more ingredients, and I'll make the additional pud (or puds, I don't think I can sensibly reduce the recipe quite that far) next week.
On a positive not, the tinies only take 3 or so hours to steam.
