TWD: Real Butterscotch Pudding

Wow. I have to just say, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this holiday season is totally kicking my trash. Assuming that things slow down a bit, I will be extremely grateful when they do. I don't know if it is just in part due to the fact that I completely skipped out on the entire holiday season craziness to spend the winter last year in the house with the kids or what, but I am just beyond out of practice. Anyway...

Yesterday was my 10 year wedding anniversary. I felt like I deserved some kind of badge of honor for making it since it hasn't been easy, but I settled for doughnuts instead. Since the recipe for this week, chosen by Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases was for Dorie's Real Butterscotch Pudding, I have been wracking my brain trying to decide what I would do with the pudding. I thought about tarts, but I figured that would probably be done quite a bit (and for good reason) but I wanted to try to be different. Besides, when I do get around to making butterscotch tarts, I think it is going to have to be the ones Peabody made a while back.

I have had this recipe bookmarked for a while over at Peanut Butter & Julie is a fellow Giada fan I thought I would give this a go. The only change I made to the original recipe was to sub the cappuccino filling with - you guessed it - butterscotch pudding. I wanted it to be a bit lighter than regular pudding though, so I whipped about 3/4 cup of whipping cream with about 1 Tablespoon of sugar and a splash of vanilla, then folded that into the well chilled pudding, before piping it into the doughnuts.

It was fun to make them that way, and for good measure to make a few doughnuts with this chocolate glaze (which is THE BEST chocolate glaze for doughnuts ever). One caution with the doughnuts is to be sure your oil is the correct temperature. On a few, mine was not, and the doughnuts were well done on the outside and still doughy in the middle.

What I really enjoyed though, was eating the pudding exactly as Dorie suggests in the book - with a little whipped cream and some buttered pecans. Awesome.

The flavor of the pudding is not quite caramel, more buttery and it was a bit difficult to quite put my finger on what the elusive flavor reminded me of. Not really butterscotch candies, more of like a Werther's candy, but still, not quite. Suffice it to say that butterscotch really is it's own flavor and I am a big fan.

The only other change I made was to just substitute vanilla for the scotch, which of course some would argue makes it not butterscotch, but, oh well. It is what it is... and what it is, is good. UPDATE:  Oh, and by the way, if Shuna says that butterscotch can have nothing to do with alcohol, then I'm with her.

Now, go see what the rest of the Tuesdays with Dorie crowd came up with this week.