Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. We have all sorts of sweet and savory dishes, as well as a face mask to wear while drinking your lattes.

I don’t remember when or if I’ve ever made a homemade pudding before, but the idea of making a homemade pumpkin pudding has been on my mind for a few weeks now. Finally, with snow on the ground yesterday and plans for a cozy day at home, I made a batch and it was delicious!

When searching for recipes, I was looking for a basic pudding with pumpkin and spice in it. What I found were many recipes for baked pumpkin custards (almost like mini pumpkin pies but without the crust). I also found many pumpkin puddings that used boxed-pudding shortcuts or had unnecessary ingredients. I wanted something with simple ingredients from scratch. Finally, I happened upon a few that looked like tried-and-true pudding recipes, and I ended up taking some ideas from one and some from another to develop the final recipe written below.  

Using a few staple ingredients, it’s relatively easy to whip up a homemade pudding. The key to success is to never. stop. whisking. Whisking the pudding as it cooks will eliminate clumps and stop the pudding from burning on the bottom of the pan. The other step you’ll want to be careful with is tempering the yolks.  Tempering eggs is done whenever you want to add eggs to a hot liquid, but you don’t want to scramble the eggs. To temper the yolks, you’ll slowly pour some of the hot milk mixture into the yolks while constantly whisking them (there’s the whisking again!). You add enough of the hot milk mixture until the temperature of the yolks is fairly warm, and at that point you can then pour the yolk mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk without fear of scrambling.

Calder and I ate this pudding as an afternoon treat while the boys napped (parents have all the fun!). I served it in these little Duralex Gigogne tumblers that I had picked up on sale with this pudding in mind… I’ve really put too much thought into this one dessert. BUT if you do make this pudding, serving it in these glasses will make your childish treat more refined. And now that I have the tumblers, I see many more pudding afternoons in my future (I’m really overindulging in this parenting gig now).

It was absolutely delicious served plain, but I also added a bit of whipped cream and sprinkle of cinnamon. Best November snow day treat ever.