Cold weather comes around and we drift into rice pudding mode very quickly. It's comfort food, a nursery sweet. While our first allegiance is to Jane Grigson and Laurie Colwin's lemon rice pudding, we'd like to branch out a bit this year, so these Asian-inspired puddings are looking very appealing.

Both of these recipes are from Gourmet (we're mining their archives like crazy right now; we hope the website doesn't go away any time soon!). The first is called Eight-treasure Pudding, and it's a chewier Asian version of rice pudding with dried fruit and a surprise of red bean paste inside. It looks like a fancied-up version of our nursery comfort food, but a wonderful option for a gluten-free dessert.

The second one is much simpler, but even more exotic. It calls for Chinese black rice or Thai black sticky rice, mixed with just sugar and coconut milk. (So this is not only gluten-free, but vegan as well!) It sounds sublime and quite easy, so we'll be making this as soon as we can find some black rice.

• Eight-treasure Puddings at Gourmet
• Black Rice Pudding at Epicurious

Have you ever tried one of these two puddings or a similar Asian-inspired rice pudding?

Related: Recipe: Lemon Rice Pudding

(Images: Mikkel Vang; Romulo Yanes)