Sugar For Christmas Pudding

Our answer

Nigella's Ultimate Christmas Pudding uses dark brown muscovado sugar as this adds a caramelly flavour to the pudding and complements the sticky Pedro Ximenez sherry that is used to macerate the dried fruits. Muscovado sugar also contains some molasses, which is an invert sugar that helps to keep the pudding moist.

Coconut palm sugar has a milder caramel flavour but we suspect that it would be fine to use in the pudding. However make sure that you use a fine crystal form of coconut palm sugar, so that the sugar dissolves easily when the pudding is mixed. The sugar in block form would not be suitable. As the pudding is steamed we suspect that it will still be moist using the coconut palm sugar. However we would mention that as we have not tried the Ultimate Christmas Pudding with alternative sugars we are unable to guarantee the results. Christmas puddings are traditionally made on Stir-Up Sunday, which this year is on Sunday 26th November 2017.