Plum Pudding (Christmas)

Page 123 on my (becoming rapidly tattered and splattered) 52nd edition CWA Cookery Book and Household hints. This book, amongst other useful snippets of information such as how to cure scaly legs in poultry, quantities for making pea soup for 120 people and a recipe for brain patties has THE ULTIMATE recipe for Christmas pudding. This is a traditionally English dessert for Christmas day but is whole heartedly adopted by Australians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_pudding
I start to make this in November.  You need to get all of the fruit together in a big, air-tight jar and pour over a bottle of brandy.  The one we use is Chantelle Napoleon from France - not because it is particularly expensive or wonderful but as it is what I can buy here! So every so often when one of us thought about it we would grab out the jar filled with the fruit and brandy and shake it around.  By the beginning of December there is no brandy to be seen as it has all been sucked up into the fruit.
I like to make the puddings in the first week of December so that the flavours, once made have time to develop.
The rest is fairly adhesive to the recipe - however:

• Carbonate of soda is bi-carb soda
• I put the beef suet through our mincer when it is slightly frozen to get it all tiny
• Cream of tartar serves absolutely no other purpose in my kitchen other than in this recipe and sits in the back of the cupboard feeling lonely and being picked on by all the other bottles.
• I have noticed that my book does not stipulate when to add the mixed spice (which is a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice) and so the first year I made this I left it out completely, remembered four hours into the steaming process and was mortified.  Convinced I had ruined Christmas, I anxiously took a bite on Christmas day to find it wasn't all that bad.  30g seems like a lot of spice but this is a ginormous recipe and it certainly isn't over spiced. I just chuck it in with the dry ingredients (and have marked my book so I remember in future makings!)
• I don't use lemon essence.  Because I had none the first time I made this recipe and it tasted so good I couldn't justify ever adding it since.
• I make two big molds (probably about 8 cup capacity) and 4 little one cup molds.  The little ones make cool gifts.  I have always used bowl shaped, stainless steel molds greased liberally with butter (hey there's half a kilo of cow fat in here, why try to get healthy now??) and have never had them not cook through or stick.
• To remove them from the mold I have a cool circle of bendable, thin metal that's intended use is to be curled into the neck of a wine bottle to allow the wine to come out in a nice stream and less glugs.  However as I don't really care if my wine comes out in glugs I use this device for sticking in around the rims to loosen the puddings.  Sometimes teamwork (one person holding the mold, the other bashing on its base) is required.
• I put the puddings in my biggest lidded pots with about an inch of water in the bottom but raised up so the base of the pots aren't touching the water.  This year we found using some of Justin's reloading dies convenient for this!
• I covered the puddings tightly with two layers of aluminium foil which usually ends up touching the top of the pudding as it does raise slightly but never seems to affect taste or appearance.  I fill the molds to about a quarter inch below the top.
• Then the waiting begins... Eight hours of listening to the lids of the pot go RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE as they slowly simmer.  I usually need to top them up with more water about four times.  I take the little one cup ones out after about three hours.
• The hard sauce recipe I make comes from another Australian classic cook book - 'The Margaret Fulton Cookbook'.  Mom had a copy of this and I can remember flipping through the pages as a child and looking at all the pictures and reading the things mom had written around each recipe she tried, a habit which she has passed down to me.
• I never resteam them to serve, partly through laziness (a character trait not to be concealed over the holiday season I believe) and partly because normally on Christmas day it would be far too hot to get all that steam going in the kitchen! Each piece only needs under a minute to be beautiful, warm and soft.
• Some of us (not the author) are not as passionate about hard sauce and prefer to have the pudding smothered in custard.  I understand that Australian/English interpretation of custard differs in solidity to the American one, the consistency we are going for here is if you mixed equal parts of sour cream and milk together. 

My camera and memory card are currently out with Justin - so I will put up a photo for drooling purposes later.

And yes I did eat a huge piece of pudding while composing this entry. :)