Baked Chocolate Pudding
- By Katie Roche
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- 27 Mar, 2020
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You guys!!! This is my *second to last* dessert post! The last one will actually have to come a bit later as I have had immense difficulty in locating its main ingredient. Until I do, after this, we will be moving on to the LAST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK!!! And it's BREAKFAST! What a dream! So I have *briefly* considered trying out this recipe countless times when perusing cookbooks in search of what dessert to make for guests coming for dinner. When I have company coming, I like to opt for things that can either be made a day or several hours ahead of time and/or which aren't excessively laborious because I'm also making dinner. Notice, if you've ever come to my house for dinner, that although you see lots of pictures of cake on my Facebook and my Insta, you probably were not served actual cake after dinner. Right now I'm really into serving Giant S'more for its ease of preparation. If you're a first time guest, you'll probably have mocha icebox cake. If you come over A LOT, I probably don't even make you dessert anymore. (Less effort = bigger love, you know? Once I've reeled you in with meringue buttercream, it's chicken parm off of a sheet pan from there on out.) Anyway, the reason I've passed this thing over so many times is because I just cannot figure out what it's supposed to BE. And I know she SAYS what it's supposed to be, and there's a picture and everything. But I just...WHY??? The recipe itself describes this as "between a brownie and a pudding". We'll get to more of my thoughts on that later, but, like, be a brownie or be pudding amirite? No one likes things that can't decide what to be.
I am THRILLED to inform everyone that the vanilla beans I purchased for this were only SEVEN DOLLHAIRS!!! For TWO!!! I've talked before about the global vanilla bean crisis. In fact, here is that Economist article I'm always telling you - whoever you are, I've talked about this a lot - to read because it explains what happened. The spice and tea shop from which I buy all of our tea and some of our spices - Summit Spice and Tea in Anchorage, AK - even had to stop carrying vanilla beans for quite a while because they were so expensive that not even the type of people who shop in spice and tea shops were buying them! (You know that is a Type of Person, alright? I know you do.) Anyway, we have foregone them in lots of things over the past couple of years, including our Best Friend Cookies - vanilla bean sprinkle cookies that we *ALWAYS* eat with our best friends when we see them now because I made them the first time they ever came over. There is light at the end of this tunnel, people. Best Friend Cookies WILL make a comeback now. The rest of this recipe was stuff I already had - eggs, butter, sugar, cocoa powder, flour, and raspberry liqueur. The raspberry liqueur, in case you don't recall, is from the WORST RECIPE ON THIS BLOG. Every time I see that bottle in my pantry I think of that recipe and how terrible it was.
I am THRILLED to inform everyone that the vanilla beans I purchased for this were only SEVEN DOLLHAIRS!!! For TWO!!! I've talked before about the global vanilla bean crisis. In fact, here is that Economist article I'm always telling you - whoever you are, I've talked about this a lot - to read because it explains what happened. The spice and tea shop from which I buy all of our tea and some of our spices - Summit Spice and Tea in Anchorage, AK - even had to stop carrying vanilla beans for quite a while because they were so expensive that not even the type of people who shop in spice and tea shops were buying them! (You know that is a Type of Person, alright? I know you do.) Anyway, we have foregone them in lots of things over the past couple of years, including our Best Friend Cookies - vanilla bean sprinkle cookies that we *ALWAYS* eat with our best friends when we see them now because I made them the first time they ever came over. There is light at the end of this tunnel, people. Best Friend Cookies WILL make a comeback now. The rest of this recipe was stuff I already had - eggs, butter, sugar, cocoa powder, flour, and raspberry liqueur. The raspberry liqueur, in case you don't recall, is from the WORST RECIPE ON THIS BLOG. Every time I see that bottle in my pantry I think of that recipe and how terrible it was.
First step: melt two entire sticks of butter. Easy. Also check out my cute little spoon I got in a tiny utensil set for like $6 at Home Goods!!! I love it!!! Also, obviously, went with salted butter as I always do. People think they're fancy for using unsalted but they're not, they're just wrong. Unless it's meringue buttercream, then you really do have to use unsalted. Never forget that.
Eggs + sugar on medium speed until they're this color. Then add in the seeded vanilla bean and the *optional* raspberry liqueur, which I did, because I have a GIANT BOTTLE OF IT and it is DISGUSTING so I might as well use it when I get the chance. More on that later.
This here is what seeding a vanilla bean looks like - you split it and then scrape the seeds out. A lot of people tell me they never even knew vanilla was a bean, or had any idea how incredibly TINY vanilla beans are, so I thought I'd include a photo. Sorry it's so blurry, I suck at photos. I think I say that every week. Can a tiny and ridiculously expensive pile of seeds really make something that delicious? Yes, yes it can.
After adding in vanilla bean and raspberry liqueur, the flour and cocoa powder went in, followed by the cooled melted butter. One of the most disconcerting parts of mixing this was watching melted butter incorporate into batter. It like, just kind of sat like a greasy shimmer on the surface of everything else for a good 30 seconds before finally mixing in. It was really weird to look at.
So let me tell you what one of the worst things about this recipe was: trying to find what to FREAKING BAKE IT IN. Ina gives dimensions - like RECTANGULAR dimensions (9x12x2)...and then says OVAL baking dish. Like sis...that is not how you measure an oval, ok? And who just HAS oval baking dishes? This will forever be a beef with her, these weird dishes she has that can't just be what normal people in America have in normal kitchens. I measured this green Le Creuset dish which, in all of its awkwardly sized glory, has managed to come in handy on numerous occasions. Of all of my incorrectly-sized, non-oval options, this one came the closest and was able to fit inside a larger baking dish which was another requirement, so I went with it. After pouring what is essentially super-thicc brownie batter into the green dish, it gets set in the larger dish and water-bathed - hottest tap water poured about halfway up the sides. You may have done this if you've ever made a cheesecake. The idea is that the water will create steam in the oven which will help prevent cracks in the surface of whatever it is you're cooking. I am proud to say I have successfully baked a completely crack-and-crevice-free cheesecake before doing this. Anyway, into the oven she goes for one hour.
So let me tell you what one of the worst things about this recipe was: trying to find what to FREAKING BAKE IT IN. Ina gives dimensions - like RECTANGULAR dimensions (9x12x2)...and then says OVAL baking dish. Like sis...that is not how you measure an oval, ok? And who just HAS oval baking dishes? This will forever be a beef with her, these weird dishes she has that can't just be what normal people in America have in normal kitchens. I measured this green Le Creuset dish which, in all of its awkwardly sized glory, has managed to come in handy on numerous occasions. Of all of my incorrectly-sized, non-oval options, this one came the closest and was able to fit inside a larger baking dish which was another requirement, so I went with it. After pouring what is essentially super-thicc brownie batter into the green dish, it gets set in the larger dish and water-bathed - hottest tap water poured about halfway up the sides. You may have done this if you've ever made a cheesecake. The idea is that the water will create steam in the oven which will help prevent cracks in the surface of whatever it is you're cooking. I am proud to say I have successfully baked a completely crack-and-crevice-free cheesecake before doing this. Anyway, into the oven she goes for one hour.
Somehow the finished product looks like the food version of a volcano to me - not like actual peaks but because of the crack that looks like it probably has lava underneath. Anyway can we talk about Ina's description of how to know if this is done? "A cake tester inserted 2 inches from the side will come out three-quarters clean." What is "three-quarters clean" exactly? Like what does that MEAN? That is not a TEXTURAL DESCRIPTION, which is really the important thing in baking doneness. Will it have a light crumb? In this case, it will not. I literally just took it out after one hour because Ina's language here, in this entire recipe really, was somehow both incredibly specific and utterly meaningless. 9x12x2 inch oval??? Three-quarters clean??? Like girl, does Clarkston Potter publish you or do you write incredibly imprecise recipes for some random site that girls will, omg, Pin to Their Recipe Board but never make? Get it together. (Actually, and I know I am being way too long-winded about this but that is kind of what I do here, Ina has a rich Hamptons girl whose daddy got her a job idiot-proofing Ina's recipes and I wondered what the actual point is of her before but now I'd REALLY like to know. Where were you, LIDEY, when Ina called for a rectangular oval???) Highlight of photo: due to the unavailability of vanilla ice cream, we went with Tillamook Monster Cookie. Tillamook is the greatest dairy company there is (s/o to the PNW) and monster cookies were my favorite cookies my mom made as a kid. This ice cream = dreamboat.
Let's examine the inside of this, shall we? It is basically dense brownie batter. The first, and very critical, piece of the review of this as a food is Dan's thoughts upon walking in the house and smelling it baking which were something along the lines of "what IS that and why does it smell so gross". So it is important for me to tell you that not only was raspberry liqueur optional, it was a MISTAKE. It was the overpowering aroma of this in the oven. It really did not smell good and made me pretty worried for the finished product.
As for that finished product, if you like brownie batter with a brittle chocolate-y crust, this may be for you! Even after going through all the steps to make it, I'm still asking: Who came up with this? Why? Who decided, oh yeah, let's WATER BATH a BROWNIE??? That being said, brownie batter IS pretty good, the vanilla bean definitely came through in a big and delicious way, and if you left out the raspberry liqueur, this would probably be pretty great. It says one recipe serves six, but I would encourage you to eat less than a serving, because it is just...a lot. Like it's good but it's a lot. "Decadent", as one might say, which annoys me, and which Dan then looked up in the dictionary: "characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline". Truly no idea how that word came to have food association. The summary of my feelings about this would best be expressed as:
As for that finished product, if you like brownie batter with a brittle chocolate-y crust, this may be for you! Even after going through all the steps to make it, I'm still asking: Who came up with this? Why? Who decided, oh yeah, let's WATER BATH a BROWNIE??? That being said, brownie batter IS pretty good, the vanilla bean definitely came through in a big and delicious way, and if you left out the raspberry liqueur, this would probably be pretty great. It says one recipe serves six, but I would encourage you to eat less than a serving, because it is just...a lot. Like it's good but it's a lot. "Decadent", as one might say, which annoys me, and which Dan then looked up in the dictionary: "characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline". Truly no idea how that word came to have food association. The summary of my feelings about this would best be expressed as:
If any of you ever get a weekend urge to tackle water-bathing something that never needed to be water-bathed (like what was wrong with just regular brownies???), let me know you feel about this. It's Pain in the Butt Brownies really, where baking them is HARDER because of the dish specs and the water and all that, but it still comes out like you never baked it at all. Best wishes, if you give this a go.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!