The Story Behind Britain's Great Taste Double Gold Pudding - McLaren's Christmas Pudding

Every November, a small stall beneath London Bridge at Borough Market starts drawing a queue that has nothing to do with the cold. It's been happening for over twenty years, and the reason is always the same: McLaren's Christmas Pudding, a recipe good enough that the Financial Times once called it quite possibly the best Christmas pudding on the planet.

The recipe that changed the rules

Traditional Christmas pudding relies on suet for richness, but suet is exactly what makes so many puddings feel heavy and dense by the third slice. Sandra McLaren, an award-winning dessert designer and master confectioner, took a different approach - cutting back the flour, removing the suet entirely, and adding extra butter instead. The result is a pudding with real depth but a genuinely lighter, melt-in-the-mouth texture, built around zesty orange and lemon, plump prunes, flaked almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Six months in the making

What happens after mixing matters just as much as the recipe itself. Each pudding is soaked in French brandy and Guinness stout and left to mature for a minimum of six months, giving the fruit and spice time to properly meld and deepen. It's a slower, more patient process than most commercial puddings ever get, and it's a large part of why this one tastes so different from the supermarket alternative - dense with flavour, not just dense.

A Borough Market institution

For more than two decades, the same stall has opened at Borough Market every November and run through to New Year, becoming a genuine fixture of the market's festive calendar. It's a rare thing for a seasonal trader to build that kind of loyalty, and it speaks to a simple truth: people come back every year because the pudding earns it, not because of clever marketing.

Great Taste Double Gold and a glowing verdict from the FT

The recognition has followed the quality. The pudding holds a Great Taste Double Gold Star award, one of the food industry's most respected accolades, and drew that now-famous verdict from the Financial Times. Customers have been just as effusive, with more than one calling it the best they've eaten in decades of Christmases.

Beyond the classic recipe, the range now stretches to mini puddings for smaller households, a chocolate and orange liqueur variant for something a little different, and gift-boxed sets designed to travel well - the puddings ship all over the world every December, a testament to how far word of mouth can carry a genuinely good product.

However you serve it - gently steamed with brandy butter, or flamed tableside for full drama, ideally alongside a glass from our fortified wine range - this is a pudding built on twenty years of getting it right. Shop the full range online at Farmfetch for easy UK delivery.