Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding

Page 416 and 422 are my favorite pages ever.

Cut to the chase: This shit is good! I made this fun little recipe for the first time around New Years Weekend, and it went off without a hitch. I shared it with my friends Carrie and Marc after a long hike and it was the magical elixir we needed as we caught our breath and stretched our calf muscles.

I MAY have gotten a little over confident in my magical pudding. Over the last week, I've been hosting a virtual Pampered Chef party, and I decided to cap off the week with a little cooking show. Since we can't be together in person, why not Zoom it up and see what happens! Have a few cocktails, tell a few jokes, see some friends, set up 2 cameras to catch all the angles and provide superior production values that will make for a great audition video for Samin's next show, and use all of my fabulous Pampered Chef tools like a pro! I even had Cindy in my ear reading the recipe so I could focus on my live feed.

Yeah, I failed. The pudding failed. I couldn't get it to thicken up. I forgot that the first time I made it, I added more corn starch early on because it was thin, and let it cook a lot longer than the recipe said. And then I started to panic because I have a bunch of people online and I'm usually totally cool with an audience, so when I figured I couldn't fix it, I poured the batter that looked more like chocolate milk into the dishes, looked straight into Camera 1 and proudly announced "This will need a couple of hours to set up!" I was successful at using the whipped cream maker (orange scented and vanilla bourbon), so I oohed and ahhed over that and poured myself another orange juice cocktail using the citrus press and shaker. And another.

After the call ended, I decided that the pudding would not defeat me. I washed all the dishes, and I made it again, this time, being more patient with the cooking and more generous with the corn starch. It worked great. It set up fabulously. The taste is lush and delicious. Very TV worthy. I should have hit record on that one!