I would have preferred it to be steak and kidney pudding, but ‘im indoors won’t eat offal, so steak and mushroom it was.  I made a batch of steak and mushroom pie filling a while back, and put half in the freezer, where it languished until Friday night.

The potential problem with a snake and pigmeat pudding is the timing – if you eat around 7 p.m, as we try to do, you need to put it on about 3 o’clock, and then you’re fairly tied to the house – making sure it doesn’t boil over, and topping it up with boiling water, and having a kitchen full of steam.  So I wanted to try out the slow cooker for this.

Whipped up some suet crust pastry – 6 oz plain flour, 1 tsp of baking powder (you could use self raising flour and leave out the baking powder, but I rarely have SR flour in the house these days), 3 oz suet.  Mix together with half a teaspoon of salt, and I added a little dried rosemary.

Then carefully add water, a little at a time, so you get a nice doughy texture – don’t make it too wet.  Roll the dough into a circle, and cut out about a quarter, which you will use for the lid.  Then grease a pudding basin (I think mine was a 2 pinter), and carefully place the dough in it; the cut out portion actually makes it a bit easier to manoeuver.   Make sure there’s no gaps in the pastry.

Then in went the pie filling,  I rolled out the lid dough and placed it on top, pinching the edges together, and put a tin foil hat on it, secured with a rubber band.

I put a small trivet in the bottom of the slow cooker, put the pudding basin on top of that, and filling it with boiling water – a full kettle’s worth.  Set the slow cooker on high, and crossed my fingers.  We ate it 4.5 hours later, and it was really lovely – the pastry was very light.  If the pie filling weren’t cooked, I suspect it would need closer to eight hours, but I will investigate in due course.