Stir-Up Sunday - Christmas Pudding Time!

Disclosure: This blog post was commissioned by The Royal Mint to promote the tradition of Stir-Up Sunday.  I was compensated for my time, however all opinions are my own.

Good morning, today is Stir-Up Sunday, the traditional day to make your homemade Christmas pudding complete with Christmas wishes and a lucky sixpence stirred into the mixture!

Last week I shared a very special Christmas pudding recipe from The Royal Mint, maker of the UK’s circulating and commemorative coins, who commissioned Rachel Walker, Food Editor of Readers Digest, to create the recipe ready for this year's Stir-Up Sunday, with the hope that it will encourages families to come together and make their own Christmas puddings this Christmas.

It certainly encouraged my little family to try making our own for the first time this year, read on to find out how it went for us!

My own childhood memories of Christmas involve the preparation as much as the day itself, and to this day I absolutely love the build up of excitement in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Every year my lovely Mum made a big batch of Christmas puddings for family and friends (she still does in fact!) and we all had to stir the mixture and make our wishes before she shared it out among the many pudding basins and steamed them all, one by one.  I was therefore determined to get my children involved in the making of our own Christmas pudding as much as possible, after all, these are memories that last a lifetime.

The boys did a fantastic job, helping to prepare and measure out ingredients, putting them all together and of course lots and lots of stirring! Small Baby was so taken with the whole thing that he burst into tears when it was time to put the puddings into their basins - he loved the stirring so much I think he would have happily sat there all day with the wooden spoon in his hand!

(Please excuse the wobbly photo - they were so excited they wouldn't stay still!)

We doubled up the recipe quantities and made 3 smaller puddings - one to test (yum!), one for Christmas Day and one for New Year's Eve - another of our family traditions.  The house smelt absolutely amazing as the puddings steamed, putting me in a thoroughly Christmassy mood all weekend!

If you'd like to see a step by step video of the recipe and my little kitchen elves in action, do watch our video, they were very proud of their efforts!  If you have any trouble loading the video, click here to watch it on YouTube, and don't forget to subscribe to the Eats Amazing YouTube Channel while you're there.

You'll find the original recipe from the Royal Mint here: Royal Mint Christmas Pudding Recipe if you want to give it a go yourself today or in the run up to Christmas.

We made a few tiny changes to the recipe, using a dairy free spread to 'butter' the pudding basin to keep the recipe dairy free, using vegetarian suet to keep the pudding vegetarian and using a dried mixed fruit mix in place of the raisins, sultanas and chopped mixed peel because I couldn't find mixed peel on its own.

The boys loved stirring in the sixpence that The Royal Mint sent to us - if you are adding a sixpence to your own pudding be sure to sterilise the coin in boiling water first, and don't forget to warn guests that it's inside the pudding when you serve it up*!

If you're making a pudding yourself today, you can share your photos on social media with the hashtag #stirupsunday. You can follow along on The Royal Mint Twitter account too. If you'd like to read more about Stir-Up Sunday, check out my previous blog post here: Stir-Up Sunday Traditions, or head over to The Royal Mint website.

Happy stirring!

Grace

*PLEASE READ: Obviously, due to size, putting a coin in a pudding might cause a risk of choking. And while we might all remember stirring a 2p or 20p piece in our puddings as children, modern knowledge of health and safety might change our thinking towards it, particularly if the coins aren’t pure silver, or have not been sterilised. As such, we recommend that you do not bake your coin into the pudding or when reheating. Instead, we recommend that coins should be placed into the pudding just prior to serving, with the slices then dished out at random to give someone the chance to find it. Alternatively, simply pop the sixpence in its pouch and hide it under one of the table settings before everyone sits down to dinner.

If you do add anything like coins or charms to your pudding, sterilise them first in boiling water. Make sure you choose items large enough to be noticed, or wrap them tightly in a ball of tin foil, and tell everyone to look out for them. This serves two purposes: it will increase the fun, and it counts as a word to the wise, so that Christmas dinner doesn't close with people accidentally swallowing the coin or breaking teeth!