That is unless you're a professional chef, in which case it's an excuse to push the boat out. What's worse though, is when you spend as much time as a pro would slaving away in the kitchen, but your Christmas pud still comes out tasting like a brick.
That's where we come in. Last year, we teamed up with the excellent Great British Chefs and their 'feastive HD' app to put together a properly yummy meal, with a little help from technology.
This time round, we've gone one step further, heading all the way out to the famous Northcote cookery school to take advantage of its iPad-powered team of professional chefs. The result was genuinely impressive (apart from our mince pies).
Northcote uses its own set of iPads pre-loaded with recipes in order to teach cooking skills. Sadly, the school's own iBook isn't publicly available right now (unless you give a class a try), but it looked great. Using a combination of scrollable menus, widgets and fact boxes, the guide shows off how each item is made, walking you through step by step.
We will also say that the cookery coaching on offer at Northcote was excellent. We made a huge number of mistakes, messed up our ingredients and generally just made a nuisance of ourselves.
However, the tutors' persistence meant that we went home with a proper Christmas cake, pudding, mince pies and our own brandy butter.
What to Read Next
Being as bad at Christmas dinner as we were, we decided to go one step further and take some of our own apps and toys as a backup. Here are our top tech tips for culinary success this festive season...
1. Great British Chefs - Festive
This app is the bible for Christmas cooking with a tablet. It has one of the best user interfaces of any app we have ever used, and boasts clear and easy to follow steps with recipes, so you don't make mistakes.
Follow this thing word for word, and you shouldn't have a problem seriously upping your game when it comes to cooking this Christmas.
One of the main issues we had while cooking at Northcote was when it came to piping out the batter for our mince pies. Basically, they came out like mince poos.
This is where the iPad comes in. It takes a bit of practice, but the training videos included in the Modernist Cuisine at Home app are perfect for perfecting your piping technique.
The app also has a huge number of different recipes that are beyond just that of roasting loads of meat and drinking brandy. As such, you can keep going with the app once Christmas has finished.
One of the things we learned quite quickly after repeatedly ruining multiple attempts at putting together a Christmas cake is that measurements are seriously important when baking.
This is where the Drop Kitchen scale comes in. Basically it pairs up with your iPad via Bluetooth and then offers up not only instant results from the scales themselves, but step-by-step guides that take you through various meals as well.
Drop's real trick though is in adjusting cookery based on ingredients you lack. It will re-jig the menu based on what you do have and in what amounts, so that the recipe will still work. Very clever.
A classic app, and something we use nearly every day following our time spent cooking Christmas dinner back in 2013. KitchenPad presents you with a set of hobs and a picture of an oven and can then go through each, setting timers and generally tracking everything you do.
At Northcote, the cookers they had were truly incredible, boasting more timers than you could ever possibly dream of. That said, incredible cookers are also incredibly expensive, but KitchenPad is truly awesome and will make up for this in your own home.
In the end though, an iPad and helpful apps are only half the battle, even in a modern-day kitchen on Christmas Day. Patience and sticking to the recipe is what's going to get you the yummiest possible Christmas dinner.
