Figgy Pudding

I have started a couple of posts...but haven't finished any of them. Things have been busy, busy since starting the new semester. My sister got home from 18 months in Brazil over the break--and got engaged a week later. I am important enough to help with the wedding plans--which, along with school, has been taking precedent over blogging. I wanted to write a post about my winter break creative projects. Here's one at least. Figgy pudding.

On Christmas Eve, one of my two sisters was still in Brazil, and the other was with her in-laws. So my parents and I celebrated with some extended family. I got put in charge of roast and dessert.

It was quite the roast. My dad picked it out. I used a recipe from Williams-Sonoma. It was lovely. And rare. But that's okay, because roast can be eaten rare.

As for the dessert, my first inclination was Christmas pudding. A little research, though, revealed Christmas pudding needs to be started weeks in advanced, and that half of its mass appears to consist of brandy--you have to keep feeding it brandy, like some strange holiday version of Audrey II.

So, thinking of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and realizing I had never in fact seen a figgy pudding, I decided that would be our dessert.

I spent about four hours working on it--and that includes the modern convenience of a food processor. (Four hours sounds impressive, but really I'm slow at just about everything. So it was probably max three hours at normal-person speed.) There are a lot of figs in figgy pudding, and all of them have to be chopped up--so do the nuts and the apples, after they've been pealed and cored.

There was also lemon and orange peal to be grated, eggs to beat...I found the recipe on Wikipedia. The Joy of Cooking, that fantastic Bible of a cookbook that could stand alone for recipes and reference, didn't have a word on figgy pudding.

The result? Figgy pudding tastes kind of like a fig newton dipped in orange juice. It tastes better with ice cream.