Butterscotch Pudding

Today I bring to you another pudding recipe, courtesy of my son's soft-foods-only diet. The chocolate was such a success (in my eyes if no one else's) that I would have just made that again, but my son really wanted butterscotch pudding. I'm not sure he's ever actually had butterscotch pudding before, but he heard of it somewhere and insisted that's what he wanted. Since it was for his benefit that I was making the pudding at all, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Brown Sugar

Here's Fannie Farmer's recipe:
Scald in double boiler (or sauce pan) 2 c. milk
Melt 1 tbsp. butter in separate pan.
Add 1 c. brown sugar to butter and stir until the sugar melts.
Add to scalded milk and stir until well blended.
Mix 3 tbsp. cornstarch, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 1/4 c. cold milk until cornstarch dissolves
Add cold milk mix to scalded milk mix.
Cook 15 minutes, stirring constantly until it thickens, then occasionally
Cool and add 1 tsp. vanilla

Melted sugar.

This recipe was truly one for the Disaster Chef blog. First of all, I didn't have dark brown sugar, so I used regular sugar (only 1/2 c) and about 1/2 tsp. of molasses. The sugar took a long time to melt. When it finally did, I got super excited. It looked really cool. So then, when I went to spoon it into the scalded milk, I was shocked by how it sizzled and instantly turned into rock candy. It looked like a scary forest gremlin (of a dark golden color) clinging to my spoon as I tried to swirl it in milk until it drowned. It took about 10 minutes of stirring to dissolve it into submission.

Stirring, stirring, stirring....

Then another 15 minutes of stirring the pudding makes this perhaps the most tedious recipe I've ever made. Usually when I'm in the kitchen for 30 minutes, I'm frantically chopping six kinds of vegetables and stirring things and tasting things and boiling other things all at once. This definitely got boring. But in the end, it was super delicious. Maybe not 30 minutes of stirring time delicious, but delicious nonetheless. And maybe even a little *too* sweet, despite cutting the sugar in half. I can't imagine using the full cup of sugar. It would be sickeningly sweet for me.