Cooking Time for Smaller Chocolate Pudding

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Pudding For Christmas Pudding Haters With Hot Chocolate Sauce (from Christmas and on the Nigella website) is a great alternative to a traditional steamed Christmas Pudding, but is equally good at other times of the year. One of the advantages is that the batter can be blitzed quickly in a food processor and then the pudding left to steam, without just the occasionall check that there is enough water in the saucepan.

Nigella's recipe is for a 1.7 litre/3 pint/6-cup basin on pyrex pudding bowl and takes 1 1/2 hours to steam. Smaller puddings will take slightly less time but as the cooking method is so gentle we suspect that you for a 850ml/1 1/2 pint/3 1/2-cup basin you would need to steam the pudding for about 1 1/4 hours. As steaming is also a very forgiving method of cooking it would not matter if the pudding steamed for 15-30 minutes longer than this.