Christmas Pudding or Cake?

[Marie N]

Help!

Dundee Cake, Spiced Christmas Cake or Christmas Pudding.
I love them all but each year I can't decide and one year we had all of them. I usually buy them.

Do you have a favourite recipe to share? Or do you have some other different desserts or festive fare? Any suggestions?

Last year I made Pineapple Cheese Cake instead but it's not the same........

Ps. I know what taste yum usually go to the hip but it's once a year!

[simplicity]

I love Christmas pudding. My mum makes a brilliant one. She makes it a few months before Christmas, but once she bought one from www.puddinglady.com.au and it was very nice. Since you are in Australia, that could be a good option.

[carolivy]

We have pies...usually pumpkin or apple. This year it will be an apple pie for dinner Christmas Eve and Pumpkin on Christmas Day.

[Lynn]

Doesn't do to make cakes or puddings around my house - no one will eat them. But I do make huge, glorious, sticky cinnamon buns, all filled with nuts and raisin for Christmas breakfast. And I start making cookies (biscuits) a week before Christmas. The kids used to eat those, but with only one kid left home who feels the same way about sweets that I do, I don't make nearly as many as I once did.

[mcoperryl@gmail.com]

Cookies, cookies, cookies...my grandsons already have their orders in and my sister and nieces have put me on notice! Years ago I couldn't decide what to buy the men in the family for gifts and instead I bought them nice baskets and filled them with cookies and fudge. They kept the baskets for years....and of course returned them at Thanksgiving so I could get started. They love chocolate chip, oatmeal & raisin, shortbread and peanut butter. I also slow roast pecan halves...the men especially like these on "game" day. Then, fudge made using marshmallow creme, good chocolate and of course pecans. Each person seems to have a favorite. But there's one thing they all agree on and it's a munchie thing. Through the years I have lost the recipe and just put it together. Of course this means that I alter the amounts as we want (if someone can't eat peanuts...I change to something else).

6 cups Crispix cereal
6 cups mini pretzels
1 large bag of peanut M&M's
12 oz of white bark (it's not really white chocolate but tastes great)

You can melt the bark in a microwave safe bowl. Melt it gradually, I start with one minute, stir, then continue in 30 second intervals of heat-then stir until you can pour it over the other ingredients. You have to mix everything together in a roasting pan to cover all of the ingredients evenly, then you press it gently in the bottom of the roaster. When it cools you can break it apart to be stored in air tight containers. There have been fights in my family over this stuff.

[jamlover]

When our children were small there had to be an angel food cake. It's a birthday party, and for their birthday they always had angel food cake, so we always had to have one of them for His birthday. But with that I usually made mince meat pie, pumpkin, apple, or pecan pie. And fruit cake!! My Uncle Cliff worked for Wonder Bread Co. and he always brought a fruitcake to Christmas Dinner. It was packed in a tin box and if Christmas was at your home you came by the box. I have tatting in one of the smaller tins right now. And I usually baked cookies for a couple of weeks before the holiday. Now, alone again, (yipee!!) we don't even have dessert being both on the borderline of being diabetic. Remember the year our first grader was diagnosed with diabetes. Talked to Mom in Arizona and said "I didn't even bake a cookie"... She replied, "well, it was still Christmas wasn't it!!"

[Marty]

Neither! My sister is a superb pie maker and has "the touch" for pie crust (she learned it from Mom). We'll have pumpkin (which I won't eat), lemon meringue, and cherry (if she can find plain pie cherries packed in water not goop) or gooseberry or rhubarb (if there's any left in the freezer).

[crazytatter]

Whatever the guest brings but I would still get a pumpkin or an apple pie just in case no one brought a dessert.

[Sunny_0ne]

It's pumpkin pie with mounds of whipped cream for us at Christmas and Thanksgiving. And if we are lucky to have any left over, it's breakfast the next day.

I am not much of a sweets eater, either, but pumpkin pie is THE exception.

[Susan B T]

We have pie... my husbands choice. Pecan, coconut, lemon or choc.