A great Christmas pudding requires the best ingredients, a liberal helping of brandy and of course… a month to mature! Consequently, we spoke to Lincolnshire pudding pros Pocklingtons near Alford to find out if the proof of the pudding really is in the eating

What are you looking forward to most this season? A pile of presents? A quick snifter of brandy in front of an open fire admiring your freshly cut and perfectly decorated tree? The cheerful chirruping of a seemingly endless procession of carol singers? Not us.

Above and beyond any other seasonal ritual we’re looking forward to a massive Christmas dinner with all the trimmings and maybe a few post-prandial snifters of sherry. Integral to your perfect Christmas dinner is a traditional Christmas pudding, and if you’re planning to make your own, now is the time to start according to Tony Limm, a craftsman baker with over 25 years experience and 15 years as bakery manager at Pocklingtons, one the county’s most renowned producers of bread, cakes and confectionary.

We visited Pockingtons and asked the team of 15 bakers working under Tony to create a special edition Lincolnshire Pride pudding for our readers, which you can win by completing our tiebreaker competition at the end of this story!

“We begin making our puddings in October so they’ve time to dry out before the season.” Says Tony, who makes over a thousand puddings throughout the Christmas season and who was just taking out of the steamer the first batch of this year’s puddings when we met him recently.

Christmas puddings are traditionally made immediately after the Sunday ‘next before advent’ – that is, at least a month before Christmas. The collect for that Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer was used before the 16th century and reads “Stir up, we beseech thee O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may thee be plenteously rewarded, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen’… Hence the day became known as Stir-up Sunday, with everyone in the household having to give the mixture at least one or two stirs. This is also the origin of the tradition of putting a sixpence in the mixture – though Health and Safety inspectors’ regulations have long ended that tradition!

However, one tradition that is still alive and well is the use of the same traditional ingredients in the batch of special edition puddings we helped to create in the company’s bakery near Alford bakery.