Stir Up Sunday (again)

I've been writing this blog for several years now and every year I write about stir-up Sunday.  I'm sure I'm getting boring, or maybe I've always been boring.  I love a tradition and this probably makes me quite a sad woman but I believe in making my own Christmas pudding, cake and mincemeat, even though it probably costs 3 times the price of the supermarket varieties and I usually throw the cake away when I discover I'm the only one eating it and my stomach appears to be carrying twin food babies.   This tradition is a recent one; before children I had a pre-Christmas tradition of buying a small Christmas pudding each week and testing them all to find the one I liked the best for Christmas day.

I think it all started with Delia's Christmas book, which was published at the same time as the birth of my daughter.  There was something about becoming a mother that made me suddenly want to become a domestic goddess and you just can't go wrong with a Delia recipe.  But there is always an ingredient that is left out of the Christmas Pudding recipes I've seen.  Not one of them mentions the drop of blood and a hair.  It's a good job otherwise Delia would have people rushing out to get a particular blood type from a small town in Essex, Nigella would make sure that the hair was seductivly swept from the fringe while pouting in the mirror, Jamie would have us sniff a lot while we dropped the blood in and Mary Berry would insist on the sacrificial blood of your first born .  Oh yes, that Mary Berry is evil, you will know if you've ever tried one of her recipes.  I do try to follow the recipe to the letter but no matter how well I tie my hair back or how careful I am with the knife and the grater these items manage to creep in.

The Delia Christmas pudding recipe uses stout and it is probably a crime to pour what you don't need in the recipe down the sink.  You may think that is a strange position to take for a non-drinker but I was brought up to believe that you didn't throw alcohol away.  It's a good job that my father is still alive otherwise he would be turning in his grave at my non-drinking and instead he can just tell people that he doesn't know how a daughter of his can be such a disappointment. So rather than drink it I searched my many cookery books, which pleased the Long Suffering Husband because he always says that I have thousands of cookbooks that I never read, until I found a recipe for sticky gingerbread that uses stout.  This gingerbread is not the biscuity kind that men and the houses that you buy in supermarkets are made from but the kind that reminds me of the picture in my childhood Brother Grim book of the house owned by the witch in Hansel and Gretel.  Co-incidentally the witch also looked a bit like Mary Berry and you could imagine her baking perfect sticky gingerbread bricks to sandwich together before decorating with every sweet ever invented.  This gingerbread is a fun recipe to make.  Once you have heated the treacle and stout together you add bicarb and stand back as the volcano erupts.  Then it fills the whole house with beautiful smells.  Everyone looks forward to having a piece for pudding (we only have pudding on Sunday) and then you get to step 5 and at the end of the paragraph in very small print it tells you to wrap the cooled bread in baking parchment and seal it in an airtight tin for at least three days.

Stir up Sunday has never been quite such a disappointment.  We now have a jar of mincemeat (to be saved for mince pies), a christmas cake (to be thrown away sometime after Christmas), a Christmas pudding (to be burnt alive on Christmas day) and the best smelling gingerbread in the world that can't be eaten for at least three days.