Tuesday 15 July 2008

Chocolate, Chocolate . . . Everywhere . . .



Chocolate, chocolate everywhere,
On my face and in my hair.
In my ears and up my nose,
Stuck on all my favourite clothes.

I love chocolate, can you tell?
Sometimes I don’t feel so well!
I even see it when I sleep,
I count chocolates instead of sheep.
~Jake Randall


Happy Tuesday and Welcome to the Tuesday, July 15th edition of
Tuesdays With Dorie, the one day a week that I get together with several hundred other backing aficionado's and make another delicious recipe from the best selling book, by Dorie Greenspan, entitled "Baking, from my home to yours."



This group just keeps going from strength to strength. What a lovely group of ladies to belong to. I am surprised each and every week by the quality of workmanship they produce and post on their blogs. In fact, I think that visiting and reading their experiences, not to mention looking at the delicious photos they post, can be held singularly responsible for the ever widening girth of my hips!

This week, Melissa from
Its Melissas Kitchen has picked . . . Chocolate pudding! You can find it on pg. 383.




Mmmmmm . . . delicious chocolate pudding. I am a bit of a funny bird when it comes to chocolate. I hate chocolate milk, chocolate ice cream and chocolate milkshakes, but I love chocolate bars, chocolate cookies, chocolate cakes and brownies and I ADORE chocolate pudding!

Oddly enough I have never made chocolate pudding from scratch. My whole life's experience up to this point has been Jello Chocolate Pudding, either the cooked stuff or the instant stuff. I've always been totally happy with them and never desired to make it from scratch. I thought it would be a great thing to try so was very happy when Melissa picked this recipe. Thanks Melissa!




It was a very unusual recipe though. It used the blender almost all the way through. I'm the happy owner of a lovely Kitchen Aid Blender that I won by writing a letter into Sainsbury's magazine last year. My letter got picked as the Star Letter and I won the best prize ever, much better than a case of wine which is what most cooking magazines seem to give away, which would do me no good whatsoever, although I suppose I could sell it on the black market for a mitt full if I did win one, but I digress . . . where was I? . . .

oh yeh, Chocolate Pudding . . . blender . . . Does anyone out there know what happens when you put a hot ingredient into a blender and then press the on button without being prepared? Double points to the first one who answers correctly!




That's right! You end up with whatever you are trying to blend all over the counter, all over yourself, and, oddly enough, or not so oddly in my case, all over the ceiling. Yes . . . I forgot the first rule of blending. Never blend anything hot unless you put a towel over the lid and hold it firmly down!

Back to square one, after a few . . . ahem . . . choice words, which I will not repeat here, but really weren't all that bad as I am a Mormon after all, and I don't think saying things like Holy Macaroni, or Jumping Jehosaphat actually qualify as words which can turn the air blue!

After a most auspicious start I finally got pudding, but not pudding as I have always known it . . . I got a beautifully rich and silky concoction that soothes and almost sent me into ecstasy when I was cleaning out the pot. (one of the advantages of not having any children and having a husband who actually dislikes chocolate) I poured it into my dishes and popped some cling film on top and then waited overnight before I actually ate anything other than the scrapings.




I decided that I would top mine with a thin layer of Creme Fraiche and some crushed Cinder Toffee, or Sponge Toffee as it is called in North America, but not just any Cinder Toffee, Cinder Toffee that I would break into chunks and dip into chocolate before I crushed it . . . and so that's exactly what I did.

I turned a wonderfully luscious chocolate pudding into something spectacularly moreish! If you want the recipe for the chocolate pudding you will have to go
HERE , but I am going to give you the Cinder Toffee recipe here.

Will I ever use boxed chocolate pudding mix again? Probably, when I am feeling singularly lazy and want a quick fix, but from now . . . on when I want a decadently gorgeous and sinfully perfect chocolate pudding, that makes you feel like you are doing something really bad when you are eating it . . . I will choose Dorie's recipe. It REALLY is the best!



*The World's Best Cinder Toffee*

Every child's delight this is a wonderful concoction that magically turns from a thick syrup into a heavenly light sponge of delicious sweet confection once you add the magic ingredient . . . baking soda. One feels a bit like a mad scientist when they are making this. It's soooo sweet and soooo good!

50g salted butter, plus extra for greasing
300ml water
4 teaspoons malt vinegar
3 tablespoons golden syrup
450g granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 bar of good quality chocolate, *optional (I use green and blacks organic milk chocolate)

Grease a large baking tin well with butter and set it aside. (mine was an 11 by 7 inch tin)

Place the butter, water, and vinegar into a large saucepan. Heat until the butter has melted. Add the golden syrup and sugar. Heat and stir until the sugar completely dissolves. Once it has dissolved and it is all mixed well together, STOP stirring. Clip your candy thermometer onto the side of the pan if you have one. Bring the mixture to the boil and allow to boil without stirring it until the mass reaches the hard crack stage on your candy thermometer. (if you don't have a candy thermometer a teaspoon of the molten toffee dropped into a saucer of cold water at hard crack stage will form brittle strands and crack when you try to shape it)

Be very careful as this mixture is very hot and can be dangerous. This is not a recipe for children to be making.

Remove the mixture from the heat and carefully stir in the baking soda. It will immediately froth up. Keep stirring gently until the bubbles begin to subside. Working very quickly, pour it into the prepared pan. Wait for between ten and twenty minutes until the mixture is set up but still warm, and then knock it out of the pan and break the toffee into pieces. Lay these pieces out on a wire rack until completely cooled, then transfer to an air-tight container (or your mouth).

If you wish to coat yours in chocolate, break up your chocolate into small bits and melt it in a bowl set over simmering water. Dip each piece of cooled cinder toffee into the melted chocolate to coat, and then place the coated pieces on a rack to dry completely before storing in an air tight container.


Next weeks recipe will be Cherry Rhubarb Cobbler on page 415, as chosen by Amanda from Like Sprinkles on a Cupcake. Don't forget to hop on over to the Blog Roll and check out all the other delicious versions of this lovely chocolate pudding!!

26 comments:

  1. It looks good enough to be sinful. I do love chocolate... any way.... any form.

    Have a great day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad you liked the homemade stuff! And that toffee looks great!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sorry to hear about your blender disaster. Thanks for the recipe for cinder toffee -- something I have never heard of before. It sounds wonderful!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow, I do love cinder toffee. Thank you for posting the recipe, I'll be giving that a try for sure! Your pudding looks delicious :)

    I've also been caught out a couple of times with my blender. Isn't is annoying? :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh my on the blender mishap! I love the use of the cinder toffee...good choice.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I love your pictures...chocolate pudding in a sea of creme fraiche! And I am so glad to have a recipe for cinder toffee - which is very hard to find in the US!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Well, that stinks about the blender, but your pudding looks beautiful. That first picture doesn't even look like food, it looks like art!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Beautiful pudding-but the real story is the Mormon cursewords. I love it and I'm definitely going to steal "Holy Macaroni" to add to my collection. I say Jiminy Chrismtas, For Pete's Sake and Son of a Gun way too much.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Beautiful pudding-but the real story is the Mormon cursewords. I love it and I'm definitely going to steal "Holy Macaroni" to add to my collection. I say Jiminy Chrismtas, For Pete's Sake and Son of a Gun way too much.

    ReplyDelete
  10. marie i use to make homemade pudding for my kids when they were younger,(they're 31 and 28 now) now you have me wanting to make it again, and i think i will! my granddaughters will be here later and they will love it. i've never heard of cinder toffee either but will be making this too soon.

    ReplyDelete
  11. This a wonderful recipe Marie and look sooo yummy!!!! thanks to post and the pictures are beautiful, relax and have a nice day!! xxGloria
    (My favorite blender die! and use other but is not the same!!!)

    ReplyDelete
  12. You give the most adorable descriptions! Wish I'd been there to help you eat up, but the clean up? Oooh.

    Laura

    ReplyDelete
  13. Put down the chocolate, back away slowly and no one will get hurt! that is my motto when it comes to chocolate. Great post. I had a blender mishap similar to yours, only with some sort of hot soup! Lovely recipe, Will definitely try this when our humidity backs off a bit! Much Love - Raquel XO

    ReplyDelete
  14. Beautiful job - and thank you for posting that Cinder Toffee recipe - I'll definitely have to make some of that to go with my next batch of pudding!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Congrats on surviving your blender mishap - I'm sure I would forget too! Your pudding looks great, but I can't wait to try my hand at the mad science with those toffee bits!

    ReplyDelete
  16. Ack! What a pudding catastrophy gone good! Thanks for your cinder toffee recipe--I grew up in Western New York, and where I come from we call it sponge candy--which makes a fabulous topping for a cake, too!

    ReplyDelete
  17. Where I'm from, they call that candy Angel Food. Yum! That looks like the best pudding I've ever seen! But don't the locals look at you funny calling that stuff pudding? Isn't pudding over there a baked affair?

    ReplyDelete
  18. I never win ANYTHING...you are so lucky!!
    And the pudding looks YUM.

    ReplyDelete
  19. ooh yikes, sorry about the disaster! i'm glad the end result was so yummy, though :) and the recipe sounds fantastic!

    ReplyDelete
  20. I can sympathize completely. We were making tamales one year and put hot chiles and the boiling water in the blender and turned it on.......and then spent the next few hours wiping orange chile off of everything. LOL

    ReplyDelete
  21. I haven't seen sponge toffee in a long time. That looks like a great addition!

    ReplyDelete
  22. oh no--cleaning up after a blender explosion is no fun! the cinder toffee looks great! in australia it's called "honeycomb" (that had me totally confused at first, because whenever i read it on a menu or recipe, i always assumed it was real bee's honeycomb).

    ReplyDelete
  23. yuuum! Looks delicious! Great job!

    ReplyDelete
  24. That pudding looks good and the cinder toffee sounds great!

    ReplyDelete
  25. Wow, pudding on the ceiling? That's impressive! =) At least at the end you got some yummy pudding to enjoy.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Your toffee-topped pudding turned out beautiful. Great job!

    ReplyDelete

Your comments mean the world to me, and while I may not be able to address each one individually, each one is important to me and each one counts. Thanks so much!