Christmas Mincemeat doesn’t have meat it and Plum Puddings don’t have plums in them – makes you wonder how these dishes got their names, doesn’t it. This year I’ve decided not to make a large Christmas Pudding I think I’ll make individual puddings instead. This old recipe uses sago, you can substitute tapioca if you need to.
The easy way to make a Frozen Christmas Pudding is just to soak fruit in brandy and stir it through softened bought ice cream and then re-freeze it. While this recipe does use bought ice cream it takes the frozen pudding concept a bit further by separating the three colors in neopolitan ice cream adding cake and Marsala soaked fruit which turns it into a Cassata Christmas Pudding. Now I’ve found it in Mum’s collection I’m thinking of making it myself this Christmas.
Although Mum always made a hot Christmas Pudding I found this recipe for a frozen pudding in her collection and while it’s similar to my version it has some different ingredients and I’m sure would taste great.
While Mum always made a traditional hot Christmas Pudding I started making frozen ones back in the eighties. This is the first one I made and I still think it’s a great recipe as it shows clearly how to line the bowl and successfully cover the pudding with chocolate.
This is very much one of Mum’s classic hand written recipes. Written on a page from an old notebook, with spelling errors and extra instructions added. I can see her in her kitchen hunting through the recipe drawer trying to find it and then enjoying making it – lots of memories.
We’re just back from a terrific holiday in Europe. We ate lots of great meals in Italy, France and England, but as always it’s good to be home – back to the land of affordable lamb and beef. This is my favourite Lamb Roast recipe, I wrote it down for Mum years ago. As you can see it’s a bit sketchy, there’s no quantities you just put as much onion and potato in the baking dish as you need.
LAMB ROAST
Fry onions in butter or margarine. Tip into the bottom of a baking pan and cover with sliced potatoes. Pour over beef stock until not quite covered. Generously rub salt and pepper into a leg of lamb. Put the lamb on a rack over the onion & potato mix and bake at 180o. Cooking time depends on the size of the leg of lamb, but it needs a bit extra time to crisp up the onion & potato.
When my children were at school I used to bake a batch of biscuits at least once a week and these were a great favourite. I must have written this recipe out for Mum grabbing the first bit of paper I could find and used a texta to write with, not a great piece of penmanship. It comes out of one of my biscuit cookbooks that was published in the 60s, but I made them a lot later than that. You’ll need 125g of butter.
This is a recipe I used to make for dinner parties in the 1980s. Mum must have asked for the recipe and my daughter wrote it out for her and added the lovely drawing. Needless to say she did not go onto becoming an artist….
This is one for chocolate lovers, of which Mum most definitely was one of. She always bought a block of Cadburys chocolate when it was on special at the supermarket and loved eating a few squares at night after tea.
I’ve been making these for years, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a recipe for them before. I think Mum just told me what to do and they are so quick and easy no recipe was needed. You can use chicken instead of steak if you like, but the juice from the meat makes the French Onion Soup taste better. Be warned it’s very hard to resist licking the foil when you’ve unwrapped them…………..
Beb's Recipe Drawer 