Chocolate Christmas puddings

At this time of year, our team celebrates Christmas by making and giving small homemade gifts to each other. I made eight mini chocolate Christmas puddings for team members as my homemade gift this week. Now, I'm not a fan of Christmas cake, although I can be partial to a bit of Christmas pudding. The best thing about this recipe, though, is the puddings are deliciously overloaded with chocolate. Mmmm.

The instructions below are for assembling the puddings in several stages. (I've bolded the key steps.) You'll need some Jaffas for the holly berry and green fondant to make the leaves, or substitute whatever you have available. You may find these recipes helpful:

• Decadent chocolate cake
• White modelling chocolate

Some tips and hints:

• You can bake the chocolate cakes in advance and freeze until you need them. Triple wrap in plastic wrap before freezing or double wrap and freeze in a zip lock bag. Defrost in the fridge.
• If the cakes get stuck in the Texas muffin pan, let them cool completely and refrigerate until firm then try again.
• Make the white modelling chocolate a day or two in advance so it will be pliant enough to roll. I'm told a pasta maker is handy for rolling the chocolate thinly. 
• Keep cool (but not refrigerated) once assembled to prevent the various bits of chocolate from melting.
• Wrap individually in cellophane bags or present as individual desserts on a side plate. Most will be big and rich enough for two people to share.

Chocolate Christmas puddings

1. Make one quantity of the decadent chocolate cake recipe. Instead of baking in a cake tin, grease and line two 6-hole Texas muffin pans (12 large muffins). Pour ~100 ml of mixture into each hole. Don't overfill the muffin pans; you want the tops to be flat so you can turn them upside down to become the bottom of the pudding. Cook on one oven shelf for approximately 1 hour 15 mins.
2. Remove pans from oven and loosen the sides of the cakes with a blunt knife while still warm. Leave to cool in pans.
3. Cover top and sides with chocolate buttercream. (Any recipe that makes ~500 g of buttercream will do.) The widest part of the cake will be the bottom of the pudding.
4. Roll chocolate fondant thinly and cover top and sides of puddings. Make sure the fondant is smooth along the bottom seam, but you don't need to cover the bottom.
5. Roll enough modelling chocolate to thinly cover about two-thirds of the pudding. Shape to look like drizzled custard and drape over the fondant.
6. Use an ivy/holly plunger cutters to cut three small green fondant leaves for each pudding. Add a jaffa on top to create a small bunch of holly.

Chocolate Christmas pudding