A coloring page of purin, the Japanese custard pudding, turned out of its mould into a footed glass dish with caramel running down the sides, a swirl of whipped cream on top and a cherry above that. If you know this dessert as crème caramel, or as flan, it is the same thing. The drawing is built up in fine pencil shading rather than flat outlines, so it suits coloured pencils worked in light layers. Free to download and print as a PDF, no registration needed.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
The firm old-style pudding or the soft modern kind — which do they prefer?
Did they ever make pudding at home from a boxed mix as a child?
Have they ever had purin a la mode in a coffee shop?
Some people dislike the caramel for its bitterness — worth asking, as it tends to divide a room.
Where does purin come from?
The name is English — purin is “pudding” as Japanese speakers heard it — but the dessert itself is crème caramel: a custard of eggs, milk and sugar cooked over a layer of caramel and then turned out, so that the caramel becomes the sauce. In Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries the same thing is flan. British puddings are a far broader and mostly quite different family, so the borrowed name is a little misleading. Japan is generally said to have met the dish as Western restaurant cooking in the Meiji era; boxed mixes for making it at home spread during the 1960s, and that is when it stopped being a restaurant dessert and became an everyday one.
What makes a “Showa retro” pudding different?
Firmness. The old café style holds its shape when it is turned out and pushes back against a spoon, and that comes from the ratio of egg to milk and from baking or steaming until the egg proteins set. One common claim is worth correcting here: it is not gelatine that makes it firm. Gelatine and agar are what many of the soft, wobbly supermarket puddings use instead of relying on egg. The firm kind, often sold in a small glass jar, has come back into fashion along with everything else labelled Showa retro. Its natural home is the kissaten, the old-style Japanese coffee shop, where it also appears as purin a la mode — pudding ringed with fruit and whipped cream, a combination usually credited to the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama shortly after the war, served on a footed glass dish much like the one drawn here.
Can you make the caramel yourself?
You can, and it is the one step to take seriously. Sugar and a little water are heated without stirring until the syrup turns amber; the pan then comes off the heat and hot water is added to loosen it into a sauce. Add that water at arm’s length — caramel is much hotter than boiling water and will spit. The colour moves fast at the end, and a few seconds too long is the difference between rich and acrid, which is exactly the bitterness some people object to. Dark tea is about the shade to aim for, and it is a useful reference for colouring the page as well.
