Oh, no, Tom, no

My Christmas Pudding Ice Cream recipe (Pirate Voice: more like a set of guidelines, really) was made up years ago in response to a special request for something like Christmas Pud that was not as heavy. It leant in those days, very heavily on G&B’s Maya Gold chocolate (dark chocolate with orange and spices). With the demise of Maya Gold I had to find a way of emulating those wonderful flavours myself. When Maya Gold came back underpowered I decided I may as well stick with my workaround.

I doubt I have ever made this dessert the same way twice but the basics are:

• Make a rich custard, using dark muscavado sugar
• Melt in a quantity of darkest chocolate
• Add spices and some orange zest
• Cool
• Churn
• towards the end of churning, chuck in vine fruits, nuts, stem ginger etcetera –  plus a slug of brandy
• the additions raise the temperature so further churning is required before devouring greedily

So, it was with interest that I noted that Tom Kerridge was on the BBC iPlayer, promising Christmas Pudding Ice Cream along with other goodies in his Tom Kerridge Cooks Christmas. I have a lot of time for Tom Kerridge and his way of doing things. I like his approach to good British Fare, done well. I decided to watch and see how he makes his version of this dessert.

He doesn’t! Tom advocates using a good vanilla ice cream and taking a Christmas Pudding, which is then crumbled into the softened ice cream before re-freezing it. He’s actually suggesting putting a suet-based pudding into said ice cream. Well, really! That’s perfectly disgusting.

I’ll stick to my recipe (Pirate Voice: guidelines!) thank you and serve up an ice cream that looks like a real pudding and tastes like a real pudding.

I had a few other quibbles with Tom’s Christmas but not, I have to say, with the notion of roasting a whole slab of smoked bacon with honey. I must try that one sometime.

Mr L had originally requested the Christmas Pudding ice cream for dessert on the 31st but we recently had a discussion that resulted in our agreeing that it was perhaps not only a little too rich but also incongruous to follow our boar and pappardelle main course. We therefore agreed to pull the ice cream forward and have it to follow our nice chicken dinner. For reasons I cannot quite comprehend, this meal is now to be served tomorrow. We appear to be “doing” Christmas! Well, only in the sense of having the dinner, I suppose but it’s an odd thing to be doing after all these years of hiking and cheese and onion sandwich picnics.

The pudding is made and I have milk infusing for the bread sauce. We won’t be doing “all the trimmings” just a nice roast dinner such as we might have eaten on a Sunday in the olden days: roast chicken, sage and onion, bread sauce, roast potatoes, veg and gravy. There will be no sprouts. No cranberries in any form. No bacon rolls or sausages or meat-based stuffings. No mince pies, no trifle, no suet-based pudding, no custard nor presents. No indigestion, no weight gain, no overdraft, no sense of guilt and no mountain of washing up either.

It might be quite nice but in all honesty, I’d rather be up a mountain with my Wensleydale and onion sarnie.

Hope you too are doing your holiday the way that you like it.

Cheers!

See you in the aftermath.