TWD: Chocolate Pudding

Melissa from It's Melissa's Kitchen chose this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe from Baking: My Home to Yours and she decided on chocolate pudding. Dorie Greenspan, the author of the book, posted the recipe on her blog as well. At first I was a little disappointed in the choice. I really wanted to learn more about baking and wondered how much "baking" there was to making pudding. Besides, why bother -- Jello Instant Pudding is pretty darn easy and mighty tasty. I reminded myself though that one of the main reasons I wanted to do TWD is to challenge myself to try things I might not ordinarily do, and making pudding surely fits that category... so I gave it a whirl!

With my new desire to bake all sorts of goodies, my DH and I are becoming buried under baked goods. We can hardly even keep up with all of the eats! I've started sending my DH to work with tons of goodies and the direction to come home empty handed! Anyhow, I've decided that I must tone it down, so today, I decided to just make half the pudding recipe. It worked out pretty well since I have a tiny food processor and could only do half a batch in it anyway. There was actually one point when even the half batch wouldn't fit! (The mixture gets very frothy when adding the hot milk. I had to empty most of it out before adding the last bit of milk.) Anyhow, everything was pretty simple and pretty quick. In fact, I'm surprised how few ingredients there were. I've been so used to baking recipes that require umpteen different ingredients (one of which is usually an insane amount of butter,) I was pleased to see how minimal this one was. In regards to the butter, I actually had to do a double take when seeing how much was needed for this recipe. For half the recipe, I only needed 1 tablespoon. At first I was like, "WHAT?! Just 1 T?" I'm so used to recipes that list the amount of butter in sticks, not mere tablespoons, I was shocked! LOL! Anyhow, I was eager to find out how this homemade pudding compared with Jello's.

After dinner, we finally dived in. This dessert is very rich, thick, and decadent -- a totally different food than the stuff from the box! It is the perfect chocolate fix! For me at least though, I could only eat a small amount. The serving Dorie recommended in the recipe was just enough. Anything more might have been too much for how rich it was. We ate just the pudding alone though. My DH said he liked it but would have probably enjoyed it more with some whipped cream to balance out the depth of the chocolate. I agree. In fact, with my first taste, I already started thinking about how I could adapt it. A pudding with that deep a chocolate flavor was just begging for a hint of orange. But how could I incorporate that? Hmmm, maybe a little orange liquor? I wonder too how it might be a hint of mint. I love mint anything. Maybe I could put in some mint chocolates with the bittersweet chocolate. And what other toppings could I use besides whipped cream? What fruit would go well with this? So many things you can do with this! I'm so glad I gave this recipe a try!