Tried and tested: Celebrity chefs' Christmas pudding recipes But none of the recipes was hard: it was simply a case of chucking everything in a bowl and giving it a good stir and a wish - mine mostly along the lines of "please let me have enough pudding basins and steamers for all of these." Ah, yes, the steaming. This is the key to a dark, mellow pud. Too short a cooking time and it will be pale and bland. Cook it long enough, and the sugars caramelise and darken. Too long, and they just turn bitter. I followed the instructions to the letter, balancing the pudding basins on upturned saucers in the simmering pans when I ran out of steamers. Then it was a matter of stashing the puddings on a cool shelf, and leaving them for a month. Fast forward to this week. I heaved the pudding basins down and steamed them again to reheat. Turning them out was tricky; next time I shall put a circle of greaseproof paper at the bottom of each bowl to aid a smooth release. I don't want to be thumping the bowl in frustration on Christmas Day. Next, I set about the proverbial proof of my row of puddings. Which turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable. Christmas pudding, it seems, tastes much better when not preceded by Christmas dinner. From a purely gastronomical point of view, it might be logical to shift the pudding eating to Boxing Day, or even New Year's Eve. But then Christmas Day just wouldn't quite be Christmas Day. Delia Smith Cost about £5.50 for a1.2 litre pudding From Delia's Happy Christmas This one is no problem to make, although the mixture does need to macerate overnight before adding the flour. Shopping was more of an issue. With 19 ingredients it had more components than any of the other recipes. One in particular was a pain. Barley wine, it turns out, isn't wine at all but a kind of ale with an alcohol content of 8-12%. I tried Sainsburys, Waitrose, Ocado, Tesco and Asda, with no luck, checking the wine as well as beer sections in case the shelf stackers had been as confused as I was. Delia's suggestion, to ask the local pub, seemed an expensive route. The off-licences couldn't help either, until I tried a beer specialist and finally struck gold, or rather Gold Label barley wine. Armed with this, and a bottle of stout (the recipe includes rum as well - Delia's reputation for enjoying a drop seems well founded) I set to. More irritation. The ingredients list called for just 75ml from each 330ml bottle. With no takers for the leftovers that would mean tipping away two almost full bottles, or (by my calculation) £3.40. Which (call me a penny-pincher) is annoying. Still, the resulting pud was dark and traditional tasting, with a proper molasses smell. It also had the most alcoholic kick of all the puds, which in my book is a good thing. So maybe the faff was worth it. Rating 4/5 Nigel Slater Cost around £12 for 2 x1.5 litre puddings From bbc.co.uk/food (online only) We start off on the wrong foot, me and Mr Slater, as his recipe is for two large puddings, which seems to take for granted that we trust him enough to commit to his pud both this Christmas and next. A touch too confident, I thought, as I put the mammoth bowlful of fruit and brandy to soak overnight. Still, a generous handful of dried figs in the mix meant this was the only pud that could legitimately be called a figgy pudding. It's a very fruity pud all round, with dried apricots as well as the usual raisins and currants, plus grated apple or quince. Hard, knobbly yellow quinces, like ugly under-ripe pears, add a honeyed magic to dishes, but the British crop has been tiny this year and imports are less worthwhile, so I stuck to apples. Incidentally, if you are after a ready-made pud with quince in, London deli Melrose and Morgan make their own with English fruit and will send them out by mail order. (melroseandmorgan.co.uk, 020 7485 1600) Quince or no quince, this was a pale pudding, but as meltingly moist as a soft-baked chocolate chip cookie, with an interesting seedy crunch from the figs. I am won over. Making two wasn't such a bad idea. Rating 5/5 Nigella Lawson Cost around £7 for a 1.5 litre pudding From Nigella Christmas Nigella's pudding, she tells us, ornaments the table as a "Massively Matriarchal Mono-Mammary." It's an unappetising bit of pseudo-pagan imagery I try to blot from my mind as I set to soaking the dried fruit in treacley Pedro Ximinez, a dark, viscous sherry that is tooth-achingly sweet. Trust Nigella to pick the most voluptuously over-the-top hooch in the cabinet. Next day, the rest of the ingredients go in, including breadcrumbs. All the recipes use them, but only Nigel and Mary specify "fresh breadcrumbs." Do the others mean powdery dried crumbs or pillowy fresh ones? I crossed my fingers and used a day-old loaf, crusts removed and cut into chunks, and blitzed to crumbs in the food processor. Nigella's pudding was moist and surprisingly spicy, which I put down to the ground cloves in the recipe. I liked it, but perhaps not as much as Slater's. And thankfully, it doesn't look remotely mammary, mono or otherwise. Mary Berry Cost around £5 for a 1.2 litre pudding Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook Berry's was the only recipe to use vegetarian suet, and the standard brand for that is Atora, which is "reduced fat." I'm suspicious of low-fat products, but I stuck with it. It's the easiest of all the recipes to make, as there is no overnight soaking. Instead, Berry douses the pud with rum after the initial cooking, a clever trick, even if much of mine ended up in a lake on the worksurface. The finished pudding was surprisingly pale and had a strange sour taste, perhaps because it is the only recipe to include the juice of a lemon. It is also disappointingly heavy, but maybe that is because of the reduced-fat vegetarian suet, so it didn't really have a fair trial. Next time I try a vegetarian pudding, I will use butter instead of low-fat suet. Rating 3/5 Eliza Acton Modern Cookery for Private Families, published in 1845, available in reprint For this most historic of puddings, it seemed right to include a recipe with a decent pedigree, and Miss Acton is said to be the first to name plum pudding "Christmas pudding." Acton's recipe is the shortest of the lot, with just eleven ingredients, including "six [ounces] of beef kidney suet, chopped small." Happily the butcher was unfazed by my request for real fresh suet, the hard fat from around beef kidneys, and proffered a smooth lump of hard, white fat. At home, I needed to remove a few membranes and red spots (best ask for twice the weight that the recipe requires to allow for this) and then simply grate the satiny fat on the coarse side of a box grater. The pudding was a revelation. Glisteningly moist (yup, that'd be all the fat) it was also surprisingly light. "It tastes like a treacly sticky-toffee pudding," remarked my teenage son, a self-proclaimed puddophobe, helping himself to a second spoonful. There's no higher praise, I reflected. Delia's Happy Christmas by Delia Smith (Ebury Books); Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus); and Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook (Dorling Kindersley), all RRP £25, are all available from Telegraph Books at £19 + £1.35 p&p. Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton (Quadrille, RRP £16.99) is available at £14.99 + £1.35 p&p.