This week's Tuesdays With Dorie selection is Real Butterscotch Pudding, chosen by Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases. I'll say this much, if you are invited somewhere for dinner and offer to bring the dessert, you can feel pretty confident that your hosts are not expecting butterscotch pudding. So this definitely has that "surprise element" going for it. Also, since there is no way that I'll be able to bluff my way through this entire post, let me just go ahead and say at the outset that until I read the recipe, I had no idea that butterscotch is made out of butter and scotch. I guess I just always thought that butterscotch was its own . . . thing. You know, the way that coconut is just coconut -- it's not made out of coco(a) and nuts? Right? Who's with me?
Well, once I learned that butterscotch = butter + scotch, I assumed that meant yet another trip to the package store for me, since neither of us drink scotch and therefore I figured we didn't have any. But when I dug into the depths of our sunscreen/bugspray/liquor cabinet (we are a professional organizer's worst nightmare)
I realized that we had not one, not two, but three bottles of scotch from which to choose:
. My husband received all of these bottles as holiday gifts from business associates over the years. Apparently, he has that "scotch drinker" look about him.
In order to figure out which scotch to use, I decided to do a little research on the characteristics that are distinctive to fine single malt scotches. There are hundreds of pages devoted to this topic, and I don't know if I'm just grumpy or lacking intellectual curiosity or burned out from the holiday frenzy or what, but about two minutes into my research I realized that I just really don't care about fine single malt scotches. at. all. I decided to do eeny meeny miney moe instead, and the winner was {drumroll please} . . . .
Making the pudding was remarkably quick and easy. I started it at 11 p.m. after a long night of present wrapping, and it was in the fridge by 11:30. It starts out with my most feared kitchen task, boiling sugar:
Standing there and not walking away from it while it was boiling made ALL the difference in avoiding an unfettered disaster. Who knew?
After mixing some stuff up in the food processor (I can't remember what, but be sure to check Donna's blog for the recipe!), you slowly pour in the hot liquid to the running food processor. I was positive that this was going to explode on me, but it didn't. It really is true that we are not given more than we can handle. After a quick processing, return it to the pan to thicken it up.
My only previous foray into pudding thickening was with the arborio rice pudding, and that was a rough road. My first attempt with that resulted in rice soup, and my second attempt turned out somewhat better, but new babies got their learner's permits in the time that it took to thicken. But this butterscotch pudding thickened up beautifully:
It smelled SO good while it was cooking. It really smelled like it would be perfect just as it was, but there was still butter, vanilla and scotch to be added.
I am not really a "hard liquor" kind of gal. I can generally only deal with it if the liquor flavor is heavily masked by mixers. Back in my pre-kid days, when we'd go to the Blue Monkey with friends after work, I'd order something like a Sweet Tartini and immediately cease to be taken seriously by everyone at the table. So I feared that I would not enjoy this pudding because of the scotch. But I remained optimistic, thinking that the combination of butter + vanilla + scotch + sugar + general Dorie magic would result in a whole new flavor, "butterscotch," which I knew that I liked, having had it many times before without ever detecting so much as a trace of "scotch."
Unfortunately, when I finally tried the pudding, I felt like I was spoon-feeding myself a Glenlivet, which is so wrong on so many levels. I am still kicking myself for not leaving the scotch out of at least half of the pudding, because I really think I would have enjoyed this much more without it. I also read in the P&Q (too late) that someone added the scotch during the cooking process, which helped burn some of it off -- that's another great idea. But for my taste, the scotch was just overpowering.
I really enjoyed making this anyway. It was fun to watch the ingredients morph into actual pudding. And I think that I would have honestly loved this without the scotch. Thanks for the fun pick, Donna! And Merry Christmas, everyone!
EDITED ON 12/23, 7:50 AM: I finally got a chance to ask David what he thought about this -- we've been like two ships passing in the night with all of the Christmas running around that's been going on. He said "I wouldn't want to eat it after every meal, but I liked it. Generally, I like to eat dessert and I like to drink booze, but I prefer to keep them separate. But there is something kind of festive about sneaking your hooch in your treats."
