I realized when I was looking at this recipe that I had never made pudding before from scratch. Jello? Sure. Other pre-mixes? Sure. But fresh from the ingredients? Nope. This one is very tasty without overwhelming, but you still have to consume it in small batches. Super easy, no prep. Just put the ingredients in the pot.
Type of meal
Cuisine
Difficulty
Dessert
General
Easy
Cooking Time
Yield
Rating
Cooking: 10 min Total: 10 min
4-6 servings
🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
Adapted from The Teen Kitchen: Recipes We Love To Cook by Emily and Lyla Allen
Ingredients
REC00011 Dark chocolate pudding
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2.25 cups whole / homogenized milk (3.25% fat)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
Main preparations
Mix together the first four ingredients (1/8 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, and 3 tablespoons cornstarch) and start heating in a large saucepan on medium.
Slowly blend in the2.25 cups whole / homogenized milk (3.25% fat), about 75ml at a time (1/4 cup).
Bring to a simmer, about 6-7 minutes.
Stir or whisk lightly for 2 more minutes, as the mixture starts to thicken.
Remove from heat and add 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, letting it melt and stir until well-mixed.
Serve.
Variations / Notes
If serving cold, place in fridge for an hour first.
Consider adding toppings such as cookies to dip (like biscotti), chopped nuts, cinnamon, or even small fruit.
I’m doing “100 day” mandates for myself, figuring out what I want to accomplish in the next 100 days as I go through 14 “periods” until I retire, and another few after that until I turn 60 (for my 60×60 goals).
A while back, I looked at the “current” period i.e., between 1500 days and 1400 days, going back to July 19, 2023, and pulled out some ideas of what I could focus on. But I didn’t really have that many days until the milestone, and it didn’t seem right to try and squeeze a “full push” into a shortened timeframe.
So I didn’t. I ditched that commitment and focused mostly on just continuing what I was doing, making progress on 60×60 and my preps for retirement. And I’ve been pushing hard on getting my photo gallery embedded in my ThePolyBlog website. I’ve done a few old years, and then all of 2004 to 2007 in full. I have done “regular 2008” as well, which is basically everything except my wedding and honeymoon from that year.
Plus, I’ve been reading up a storm. Contemporary stuff as well as some genre fiction.
NaNoWriMo is about to start and Jacob and I are going to hit the writing table.
And I’ve been trying out some new recipes. Three in the last two weeks.
I need to do more on exercise and finish the setup of the basement.
Plus Christmas will happen in there, and some more “special projects” will get some attention. Stay tuned. The next hundred days has begun.
Three women carry a dark secret from their homecoming dance, and an eccentric billionaire’s death may force the secret into the light.
What I Liked/Didn’t Like
The premise of the story is that an unidentified baby was found buried in a park 18 years before, and a billionaire’s widow offers a $1M lottery if people will donate their DNA to solve the case. The three girls are affected by the premise, and you know something happened with a baby that ties them somehow to the case; you’re not sure what, but they’re “involved”.
I struggled to finish the book…normally, if I’m reading a book that isn’t singing to me, I stop, and I don’t review it. Equally, if it is a debut author and I’m likely to rate it less than 3 stars, I also don’t review it. But I liked the premise of the DNA lottery. It was new, it was diffferent, how would it affect the ending? So I kept with it.
The writing was okay, but I was increasingly unsatisfied. There are multiple scenes with intentionally vague language to hide the “solution”, but it only works because the story has a slight PoV shift before each one. It’s not quite as egregious as someone thinking of a killer and using the personal pronoun “they” instead of “he or she” or “Jack or Jane”, not because it fits their actual pronoun or how they think of that person, it’s just “they” so the reader doesn’t figure out the mystery too early.
Plus, there were a couple of weird coincidences and a completely wonky character shift in a tertiary character at the end. And one deliberate misdirect to make you think one of the characters might have been raped, but wasn’t, and yet the possible rape was one of the few things explaining her weird behaviour as a high-schooler prior to the secret event. Plus, all three women are each acting “off” during the day of the secret event, to make you think they’re possibly pregnant, yet it has nothing to do with the outcome and is never explained.
By this time, I was 3/4 of the way through, so I had to finish. And yet I expected to be ticked at the ending — I thought it would either be something trite and superficially handled OR it would be a giant twist that made no sense. But then something wonderful happened.
The author tied up the story with a neat twist. Sure, part of it relied on a giant coincidence that I wish had been handled better, but the explanation explained stuff way better and didn’t end like any of the two obvious solutions. And the epilogues were pretty good. A bit short, but interesting. I had to bump it up to 3 stars. I confess that not all of the stories are tied up equally well. Some behaviour is explained, other bits are left dangling and seemingly the antithesis of the rest of the character’s behaviour, but whatever. It was worth finishing.
Disclosure
I received a free copy of this book from Amazon, however, I am not personal friends with the author, nor have I interacted with them on social media.
Andrea’s aunts threw an engagement party for us at the cottage on the August long weekend, which was the first time for our two families to get together. We had lots of mingling, plus toasts from the uncles, and way too many presents. Plus a cake with our panda logo on it!
As you can see, we went with a “fun” invitation as if we were announcing a play (since we were using the Ottawa Little Theatre as our venue). We also had two logos (looking left and right), two shots of the boat from their website, our engagement photo for the newspaper, and two of the plaques made up for a shower that we re-used throughout the year.
