Christmas Pudding Spiced Rum Recipe

We decided to test this recipe for Christmas Pudding Spiced Rum from the current Waitrose Kitchen magazine - isn't that nice of us? You're welcome! No really, not too much trouble at all...The recipe takes two weeks to infuse, so if you start today it will be ready by Christmas!


The ingredients are:

70cl bottle dark rum 

2 vanilla pods

2 large cinnamon sticks

2 star anise

3 whole cloves

75g light brown muscovado sugar

1 orange

First of all, a disclaimer. We didn't have quite the right ingredients, but decided to go ahead anyway. We didn't have any light brown muscovado sugar so used some dark brown soft sugar that was in the cupboard (it's a moist sugar like muscovado, so it should be OK). And we only had one cinnamon stick so decided to just add an extra one in the next day. 

The method is:

1 Pour 100ml rum into a small saucepan. Using a small sharp knife, split the vanilla pods down their length, then add to the pan with the cinnamon sticks, star anise, cloves and sugar. Using a vegetable peeler, pare thin strips of peel from the orange and add to the pan. Slowly  warm the rum over a low heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar; do not allow it to boil.

2 Pour the contents of the pan into a large, sterilised jar, then add the remaining rum. Once cool, tightly seal the lid and shake vigorously. Leave the rum in a cool, dark place and give it a good shake every day to muddle the spices.

3 After 2 weeks, strain and discard the whole spices and orange peel. Decant the rum into small new, sterilised bottles (or a larger one, if you prefer) to give to your lucky friends. 

So that's it. The rum is in the cupboard being muddled; we're trying not to get muddled preparing for Christmas. We'll report back on the rum when it's ready, by which time we may be more or less muddled than now!

(Just so we're clear, Waitrose owns the copyright to the recipe - although we take full responsibility for the pictures other than the one of the magazine itself.)