These Christmas Pudding Muffins are the perfect festive treat topped with rich and fluffy Irish cream frosting – guaranteed to get you in the Christmas spirit!

I gotta say, I’m totally loving the way my house is smelling right now!  All the warm spices, festive baking and sweet and savoury heaven!  This year has also been full of a few revelations – Phil now eats both Christmas cake AND mince pies.  Something he’s always wrinkled his nose at in previous years.  So, looking to capitalise on his new found enjoyment of some of my favourite bits of Christmas we have Christmas Pudding Muffins.

They’re a sort of gentle introduction to Christmas pudding itself.  Which let’s face it, can be an overwhelming end to Christmas dinner.

The beauty of these vegan muffins is you can have them with or without the fruit but still have all that wonderful Christmas pudding flavour thanks to Foodie Flavours Xmas Pudding little bottle of wonder.

Like all their flavours, it’s super intense and you don’t need much to give you the most amazingly rich Christmas pudding flavour and smell.

Same with their Irish Cream flavouring I’ve used in the vegan buttercream frosting.  The essence gives the most wonderful Irish cream flavour at a fraction of the cost and because it’s only a few drops we’re using it doesn’t upset the balance of the frosting recipe.

There’s nothing mystical about vegan buttercream – all you’re doing is substituting the butter for vegan butter.  Preferred brand is up to you but for frosting I mostly use block vegan butter rather than the margarine tub spread.  It holds its shape better and is a lot less likely become almost too soft to pipe by the time you’re piping your last couple of muffins!  If you’re making the buttercream by hand though, you will want to leave the butter out overnight or at least for a few hours to make the mixing infinitely easier on the arms!

The muffins themselves are ridiculously easy to make.  Mix together a bowl of dry ingredients and a jug of wet ingredients then mix the two together, pour into your festive muffin cases and bake. In fact, you could probably even just mix the whole lot together in a blender to make it EVEN easier.

And with Christmas no longer creeping up on us but rather running at us completely at full speed does anyone else never feel like there’s enough time even though we’ve known about Christmas since last Christmas?

So, I recommend taking around an hour out from the madness, bake and decorate these Christmas Pudding muffins, pause, breathe and enjoy a moment of sticky sweetness amongst the chaos.

If you make this recipe or any of the recipes from The Cook & Him we’d LOVE to see! Just snap a picture and share it on Instagram using #thecookandhim and tagging @thecookandhim in the photo itself (as this guarantees we’ll see your picture!)

And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram , Facebook or Twitter for even more recipe inspiration and chat, competitions, behind the scenes and so much more!