Christmas treats 1: mini Christmas puddings

I once watched an episode of Nigella where she prepared these marvellous Christmas concoctions. I tried them, tweaked them and made up my own version, which is probably a bit more chocolatey and a bit more alcoholic but I'll never apologise for that. They are, however, delicious and adorable and a great gift or something to show off at coffee time. 

 Ingredients:

1 shop bought Christmas pudding, which you should crumble into about 6 packed cups of rubble

1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips

1/2 cup of milk chocolate chips

1 tablespoon of rum

1 tablespoon of Grand Marnier

1 tablespoon cinnamon

3/4 cup of melted butter (about 200 grams)

¾ cup single cream

½ cup of cocoa

½ cup of white chocolate chips

red and green crystallised cherries

Melt the butter and the cream in a pan and add the dark and the milk chocolate and the cinnamon, stirring until you obtain a creamy mixture. Add the pudding and the rum and the Grand Marnier and mix the whole thing until you have a rather firm paste.

With your hands wet, snap walnut-sized portions of the paste and roll it in between your hands until you obtain a ball. Place it on a tray and go through the entire batch of paste. Place the balls in the fridge for an hour at least. Take them out of the fridge, roll them in cocoa and put them back in the fridge for half an hour.

In the meantime, melt the while chocolate. Take the treats out of the fridge and dollop a small amount of melted white chocolate on top of each, making it drip like rum sauce on a real Christmas pudding.

Put back in the fridge for half an hour, in which time you should try and carve little berries out of the red cherries and little leaves out of the green cherries to make it look like holly. What I do is cut slices of green cherries and little cubes of red ones: they are so little it doesn’t really matter.

Place the leaves and berries in a holly-like ashion on the semi-solid chocolate and then put back in the fridge to solidify.

These are glorious treats. I offer them on a tray with a side of coffee in which I slip a good shot of Bailey’s.