Happy blogiversary to me!

Wow!  I can hardly believe I've been blogging for an entire year!  And what a year it's been...  It's totally appropriate that I hit such a big milestone on a Tuesday, since Tuesdays with Dorie has been such a big part of the past year.  Almost half of my posts have been related to this wonderful baking group.  43 weekly Dorie recipes for me so far (I joined for week 7 and have missed only 2 or 3 weeks since), plus a few others from the book that I've made on my own.  9 official Daring Bakers challenges completed, plus a couple of rewinds there, as well.  Lots of new things learned.  Lots of ingredients consumed (don't think too hard about all the butter and sugar...)  And of course, many wonderful new friends made out there in blogland!

I don't have as much free time as I'd like right now, what with all the last-minute holiday stuff to do.  But as soon as I have a few more minutes to myself, I'm going to steal Erin's great anniversary idea and highlight some of my favorite recipes from the past year.  So look for a post on that later this week.  In the meantime, let's get back to this week's TWD recipe...

Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews and Suitcases chose Real Butterscotch Pudding for us to make this week.  Unlike last week, I didn't mess around with this recipe at all.  Okay, that's not entirely true.  I didn't mess around with the ingredients at all.  The method is another story.  Until I was reading this week's P&Q, I'd forgotten all about the mess I made when making Dorie's chocolate pudding back in July.  The recipe calls for using a food processor.  I have a large one, but it can't handle the amount of liquid in this recipe.  I thought about using my regular blender or immersion blender, but was feeling lazy and didn't want to clean much of anything.  So I went totally low-tech and just used my heavy duty whisk for the whole thing.  It worked just fine.

I did get to add one new thing to my pantry this week.  Up until now, I didn't have any scotch.  And real butterscotch pudding calls for real scotch.  So I headed over to my favorite source of wines and spirits to acquire some.  A very nice person there helped me find a relatively small (200 ml) and not too expensive ($9) bottle of scotch that would work fine for any cooking needs I might have.  It's a blended scotch (Dewar's), rather than a single malt.  It's now residing next to my small bottle of bourbon that I also only use for baking (nice with pumpkin things...).  

And the verdict?  I normally don't go for butterscotch desserts because I find them overly sweet, but I really liked this!  The scotch actually made a huge difference.  I tasted the pudding before I added it, and it was pretty good.  But the scotch made it so much better!  It reminds me of when I add rum to chocolate desserts.  You don't really taste the rum itself that much, but it enhances the overall flavor of the dessert.  Jamie really enjoyed this one as well.  But the biggest fans had to be Brianna and Gillian.  I shouldn't be surprised--I think they love all pudding (okay, except maybe rice pudding).  

Thanks to Donna for picking this week's recipe.  You can find it on her blog, along with lots of neat posts about how she bakes while living on a sailboat.  And to see what the other TWD folks did this week, check out the blogroll.