hannah

This is a repost. I was not clear enough about the instructions in Dec '04

2 oz tinned pineapples 57g
1/4 lb dried peel 113g
2 oz glace cherries 57g
1/2 lb crumbed bread 227g
3 tbsps brandy or sherry
1/4 lb currants 113g
1/4 lb dates 113g
2 oz almonds 57g
2 oz chopped figs 57g
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/4 tsp carb soda
1/4 lb plain flour 113g
1/2 lb sultanas 227g
1/2 lb raisins 227g
1/4 tspn nutmeg
1/2 lb brown sugar 227g
5 eggs
1/2 lb butter 227g

1lb = 454g = 16oz


All of the fruit is chopped and the bread crumbed.
Cream butter and sugar and add brandy/sherry ( is it both? I prefer sherry). Add eggs to the mixture.
Then add dry ingredients all together.
Put the pudding mix in the centre of a large square of calico and pull up the sides and tie with string on top. Allow enough string for hanging.
Boil for yonks: maybe 3 hours to cook.
Hang.
Wait for yonks and yonks. The pudding can hang for a couple of months.
Boil in the cloth for maybe 1-2 hrs before serving.

When you serve it, flambe with hot flaming brandy in a darkened room.
Brandy Custard is perfect with this as is ice cream.

**Edit**
Women's Weekly have a recipe over at ninemsn for Boiled Christmas Pudding that improves the technique by putting the brandy with the dried fruit and leaving that overnight. They flour the cloth too. They open the cloth and scrape at the pudding before storing again, I'm not doing that.

Christmas Cake

3/4 lb seedless raisins
2 oz prunes
2 oz dates
3/4 lb currants
1 lb sultanas
1/4 lb glace cherries - halved
1/4 lb candied peel - chopped
2 oz blanched almonds - chopped
1/2 lb butter
1/2 lb brown sugar
1 tbsp black treacle
1/2 lb plain flour
1/4 tspn salt
1 tspn mixed spice
6 eggs
1/2 wineglass sherry or brandy
1 tspn carb soda
1/2 dspn hot water

Toss cherries in flour. Cream butter and sugar and stir in treacle. Sift flour with salt and spice and divide into 3 portions. Mix 1 portion with fruits, peel and nuts. Separate eggs. Beat yolk into creamed butter mixture gradually, adding 2nd portion of flour at same time. Fold in fruit and flour mixture and brandy into creamed fat mixture. Whisk egg whites until stiff and fold into mixture with last portion of flour. Add carb soda dissolved in the hot water. Turn into 8" square cake tin, greased and lined with greaseproof paper and tied round with 2 larets of brown paper. Hollow out cenre of mixture lightly. Bake in centre of slow oven, 300F (150C) 1 hour then 270F for 3 - 3 1/2 hours.

I told you already about autostitch. I have found it does a better job than the software that came with my camera. I notice they have a commercial product now as well as an iPhone app!. I have a couple more tips for the keen user.
If the program is running out of memory, you might be able alter the system memory settings. This did not fix my problem and I had to reduce the size of the jpeg files I was starting off with somewhat. The final image was still big at 9524 pixels across.

Another difficulty I was having involved the program not being able to detect which images to join. Probably because there was not enough overlap. It is possible to make the program more likely to join images in some cases by reducing the "SIFT Image Size" scale value. In my case from 25% to 20%. This photo shows how this allowed the program to blend images that did not match well. This is what I wanted in this case. Doing this followed by some tidying with a rubber stamp tool allows you to create a stitch you would otherwise have had to do using photo editing software.
If your camera has a stitch-assist mode, autostitch can work with those files. The idea is that the camera will lock the exposure, iso and aperture so that that the brightness at the joins will be even. Manually setting these is also fine.