I've done
A Christmas Carol ten times and yet I've never thought to explore the flavors of figgy pudding until recently. I found
this recipe for figgy pudding but I made a few changes. I replaced brandy with rum because somewhere I found a fig pudding that used rum and that's all we had in the cabinet. I discovered, düring, that we only had Italian herb bread crumbs and not regular ones so I put crushed Cheerios in the mix instead. We didn't have nutmeg but we did have pumpkin spice and cinnamon so. And finally instead of dark chocolate I used semi-sweet chocolate. The recipe calls for three to four hours of baking but it was really like five and a half in a big Pyrex dish in a pan of water that eventually boiled away. I stabbed it with a fork a million times to see if the middle was done (we didn't have any big skewers) and eventually I had to leave for my show so I told my mom to give it another hour and then take it out of the oven. It sat in the refrigerator for a week and a half because I was too nervous to bring it to Christmas because it had to be heated before serving and I didn't want to show up to someone's house and take over their kitchen. Also, what if it was bad? I didn't want to be judged on Christmas. It was served ("It will serve, Ebenezer, it will serve.") on Christmas Day at a small family affair. My mom really wanted to set it on fire and I wanted to cover it with a thick glaze. Neither of those things happened. The final results can be seen in
this video and also below.
Remember those pumpkins I was collecting? They're thriving even as I write this weeks after the New Year. I seasoned them up with greenery (and later, those
tiny copper lights.)
My cast had a door decorating contest at the theatre. I hid a few characters from Oz in my snowflake wreath.
