Christmas is just around the corner, and we loved a little twist with some traditional Christmas dessert.

This year‘s Christmas I'm planning to make some mini sized Christmas pudding -- individually served after dinner and they would look absolutely cute on the plate to surprise the guests.

They're really easy to make, and would be perfect as gifts or your dessert for your holiday season.

Supplies

Mixing bowl, whisk, spatula, small container (or bowl, depending on the size of your pudding), rolling pin

Step 1: Ingredients

I tried to take a photo of everything however cannot fit in the whole amount. In this photo it is a smaller scale recipe to get the ingredients in for the reference. I used the actual recipe below and it will yield 4 small Christmas Puddings:

Pudding ingredients:

Dried dates 75g

Dried apricot 75g

Raisin 75g

Walnuts 75g

Candied mixed peel 50g

Unsalted butter, melted or softened 75g

Plain flour 50g

Mixed spice (ground cinnamon, ginger, nutmet) 2 tsp

Bread crumbs 30g

Milk 30ml

Dark rum, Whiskey or Brandy 50ml

Egg 1ea (around 50g net weight)

Decoration ingredients:

Whipped cream or pouring custard 100ml

Green fondant 1 piece about 15g

Corn flour for dusting

Candied pearls red colour, about 10 ea

My mini pudding is about 150g each, and this recipe will yield a perfect 4 portions. You can adjust the amount of recipe depending on the volume of your own mould.

Before I started with the Instructable I wanted to show how to make candied mixed peel as well, but in Australia we're having Christmas in summer and citrus is not in season (in fact they're quite pricy and the peel is quite dry and flavourless at the moment), so I won't have the right ingredients to start with. However in this contest I've seen a perfect tutorial (thanks to Instructable community!) with a really good post on how to make your candied peel. If in your area the citrus is in season, please try to make your own to add a bit more spark to your work.

For the lovely made candied peel tutorial please click here. I also suggest you to use a mixed citrus for the peel -- orange, lemon and lime for the colour and the taste.

Step 2: Prepare Your Dry Ingredients

OK this is the part that requires most work... CHOPPING!

All the big pieces dried fruit and nuts would need to be chopped into smaller pieces. I chopped my dried apricot, dried dates, as well as some big pieces of raisin and the walnuts. However you don't want to use a food processor as it will chop them too fine and will lose bite when you eat the pudding.

Be careful when chopping nuts, don't put your fingers next to the blade just in case they slip.

Now put all the chopped ingredients together and mix them well in a mixing bowl.

Step 3: Mix the Wet Ingredient Into the Dry Ingredient

Now you can put in all the remaining dry ingredients into a bigger mixing bowl -- flour, bread crumbs and mixed spice. You can adjust the amount of spice with how strong you want your pudding to be.

Use a whisk to mix the flour evenly into the nuts and dry fruits. Put in the egg, milk and rum. Please note in this recipe the total amount of liquid is about 120ml-130ml, so if you have extremely large or small egg please adjust your milk accordingly.

Slightly melt your butter and also put in the mixture. Use a whisk to combine everything till it forms a paste.

Step 4: Fill in the Mould

Here you can use any mould that you like. Traditionally people would use a big ceramic bowl, as I'm making some mini ones so I'm using a small stainless steel container as my mould. I also used two silicone egg poachers as my mould and they turned out nicely as well.

Use a piece of butter and rub the butter on the inside of the container. As shown in the picture, the container should be fully covered with a thin layer of butter.

Now you can fill the mould by using a spoon, make sure you press the batter down and leaves no air pockets between each fill. Each of my pudding is around 150g however you can adjust the size depending on your mould or the serving you want.

Step 5: Steam the Pudding!

If your bowl has a cover then that's great, if not then you can use cheese clothes to wrap the top. As I have 4 individual dessert and only 2 pieces of cheese cloth, I used foil cover as a lid.

Cover the container with foil, and punch a few holes on top for the steam to come out. Put the containers in a pot, fill water till halfway of the mould.

Put on the lid of the pot and turn on medium heat to boil/steam the pudding. For this size I steamed them for around 40 min, if your pudding is bigger then you need to steam longer -- I used to steam a really big Christmas pudding for nearly 4 hours! You will need the steam and heat to make the pudding really combines together, and it will be rarely "overcooked", so I would suggest steam at least 30 min - 40 min for small ones.

Please keep an eye with the water level. If the water almost dried up then refill some water and keep simmering.

After the pudding are steamed, flip the mould onto a tray or plate, and the pudding should come out super easily.

Step 6: Decoration

Now we've moved on to the decoration -- it will really say "Christmas" after the work.

I used a piece of green fondant (you can colour a white fondant with green and brown colouring if you want), and I put some corn flour in a chux cloth and tied with rubber band to make sure not putting too much corn flour on my fondant.

Roll out the green fondant into 1-2mm thick, and cut with a plastic plunger with holly leaf design.

Push out the plunger and you will have some nice Christmas leaves. Set them aside on the bench or on a tray to let them dry and set. Once they're hardened it will be much easier to handle.

Step 7: Whip the Cream

Some people would eat the pudding with whipped cream, and others will use custard. I'm a bit more "cream" person so I used whipped cream.

I used 100ml cold cream and 10g sugar put in a mixing bowl and whisk by hand. Keep whisking till you have a soft peak (slightly fluid but also will hold the shape when lifting the whisk)

Use a spoon to scoop whipped cream on top of the pudding, and smooth them back with the back of the spoon. With the right consistency of the cream, you would have some flow in the cream but not dripped every where.

Step 8: Final Touch

Before serving, put on the fondant Holly leaves you cut out on top of the cream, and put 2 red candy pearls in the middle to finish the look.

Please note the fondant decoration should only be put before serving, as it will absorb moisture from cream and will bleed colour on the cream if you leave it too long.