Coffee shops are wonderful places to get hot, steamed milk products. If there’s one thing a lot of desserts required, it’s hot steamed milk products.

Order your favourite coffee drink. Ask for it as a breve, which means with cream. It should be around 18% milk fat. Those desserts that make pudding often ask for as much milk as cream and 18% is pretty close to half way between whole milk and heavy cream. 10% would work. If any coffee shop makes it in whipping cream, ask them to cut it with milk.

Ask for it double sweet and no foam. For 12 ounces, use 2 yolks, 16 ounce three yolks and 20 ounce, use four yolks. Separate your yolks and beat them up. Put your egg whites in the fridge and tell yourself you’re going to make something out of them. Tell yourself they’re even better if you let them sit around for a few days and then come to terms with the fact that you’re just going to throw them out in a week.

Add the hopefully still hot milk in a slow stream while you’re beating your yolks the whole time Ask your wife to mix up a tablespoon or so of cornstarch in a quarter cup of milk and make a note that 2 – 2 1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch would have made a thicker pudding for the next time.

Strain your eggy mixture into a pot that you telepathically knew you were supposed to put on the stove as you got back from the coffee shop. Turn it to 2, realize you don’t have all day, and turn it up to four and a half. Do not stop stirring the bottom. Add vanilla in whatever form you have it in. Strain the milk through the strainer you strained your egg through if someone adds the cornstarch to the liquid instead of the other way around, but don’t name names. At this point, you can throw in a handful (read: 1/2 a cup) of chocolate chips if the flavour of your coffee works with it. Don’t forget about white chocolate chips. White chocolate and pumpkin are amazing together.

Stir until it coats the back of a spoon and you can draw a line over the back of it with your kryptonite fingers. Pour into the bowl. If you kept stirring the bottom, it should all come away. If your technique leaves something to be desired, pour what will pour from the pot and leave the burned stuff stuck to the bottom. You can stir in a pat of butter at this point. I did for the first time ever and since it was salted butter, it was amazing. If you don’t add butter or if the butter you add isn’t salted, go back in time and add a pinch of salt to the strained eggs. But who literally cooks and reads at the same time?

Cover with plastic wrap on the surface of the skin if you don’t want a skin to form. The skin isn’t terrible, it’s just chewier. If you want chewier pudding, leave it off. Put it in the fridge and let it set up.