Eggless Christmas Pudding

Christmas pudding is a steamed rich fruit pudding served during the dinner on Christmas. I have read about the Christmas pudding in an Agatha Christie novel in which Poirot visits a house during Christmas and solves a mystery. The ruby which he came in search of would be found in one of the puddings served on Christmas. I never thought that I will be making Christmas pudding. When I was going through my book shelf I saw this novel and decided on doing it at home. Traditionally pudding has eggs, suet ( a type of fat from animals) and alcohol. I decided to make an eggless, suet free, alcohol free pudding at home. I saw a vegetarian version of the pudding at Titli's Kitchen but still it had eggs. So I adapted Titli's recipe according to my preference and ended with  a flavourful, delicious, moist, rich pudding. This is steamed for 6 hours and once cool you need to remove it from the mould. I am having this pudding mould for so many years but never once used it. And finally it came to use and I am so so happy for recreating this in my kitchen.

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Eggless Crème Brûlée

Crème Brûlée is an egg based custard topped with a crunchy caramel layer. The crunchy caramel layer is usually formed with sprinkling sugar and heating it with a blow torch to caramelize it. A caramel disc may also be prepared and the custard can be topped with this disc while serving. For Baking Eggless Group Challenge, Vimala Lakshmi of Cooking Club suggested this from Sanjeev Kapoor's website. The egg in the custard makes it a creamy pudding. And the caramel layer needed a blow torch. These were the challenges we had to face during the preparation. I successfully replaced the eggs with china grass and used a heated spoon instead of a blow torch ( the idea is not my own. I adapted it from here) and the custard turned out fabulous. Though the caramel layer was uneven, it's crunchiness was a perfect combination to the creamy pudding. The quantity made 6 small ramekins of crème brûlée and we both enjoyed them to the core. The Baking Eggless Group has completed two years successfully and we really had a great time converting twenty four egg based recipes into eggless ones. And I hope to continue it for this year also and you will see more interesting recipes in future...

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