Prepare in October and keep in a cool place or refrigerator until Christmas Day. Not recommended by any nation's Heart Health Authorities.
Prepare the dried fruit. Blanch, skin, and chop the almonds. Peel, core and grate the apple. Put these into bowl with candied peel and lemon rind. Mix well. Chop suet finely and add to sieved flour or break up prepared suet. Add the sugar, spice, breadcrumbs and salt and mix well. Mix in prepared dried fruit. Beat the eggs. Open one bottle of stout and taste to ensure that batch was made properly and stout does not have an "off" flavour. ( This is highly unlikely given the antiseptic conditions around breweries these days but one can never be too sure.) Open second bottle and mix 150ml with eggs and lemon juice. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl and bind well. Ask each member of family to have a stir of the mixture in the bowl. Cover and leave mixture overnight in a cool dry place or refrigerator. Return to stout bottles and subject to further taste testing. If necessary send wife or partner out to bottle shop for more bottles of stout to ensure that your first impressions of the quality were correct. Request them to bring home a bottle of John Jameson's best whilst they're about it.
Next day, get up very gently and inspect the mixture. Wonder what all the fuss about gourmet cooking is all about. After a leisurely breakfast of toast, marmalade, coffee, and the Sunday papers put mixture in greased round bottomed pudding bowls - these can be glass, creamic or stainless steel - and cover with plastic wrap or lid if bowl has one. Put pudding bowl into a large pan of simmering water and cook for hours on low heat until mixture turns dark brown ensuring pan does not boil dry by adding water to pan now and again. Remove bowl from pan, cover and allow to cool. Keep pudding in cool dry place or refrigerator or freezer depending on climate in your neck of the woods.
To serve, place bowl in pan of boiling water and cook for a further two hours over moderate flame again ensuring that pan does not boil dry. Remove from pan at end of Christmas dinner. Carefully turn out pudding onto serving plate. Decorate with holly sprig if you have one. Pour a quantity of cheap brandy over steaming pudding and set alight (this should not be attempted by anyone who is not in full control of their faculties at this point on Christmas Day). Bring flaming pudding into dining room and sit down to general acclaim, cries of "Well done", "For he's a jolly good fellow" etc. etc.. Serve pudding in bowls on its own, with cream, or ice cream or sauce as below.
Notes: I always double up on the ingredients. This allows me to make more than one pudding and keep it in the freezer until our winter time. Thus our family in the antipodes can enjoy a Christmas Pudding in approximately the right weather conditions. There is always some pudding left over from the dinner as it is very very rich. The best thing to do with it is to slice it up and fry it in butter and serve it with brown sugar sprinkled over it, with perhaps a dollop of cream next morning at breakfast.