Sunday, April 17, 2011

Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake: Perfected

As you may recall, a while back I posted a recipe for chocolate pudding cake as an example of how to convert a recipe to honey. Since then, I have tested the recipe, and found that a little tweaking made it much better.The original didn't have enough pudding, and the cake did not rise through the syrup as it was supposed to. Both problems have been solved.
So here it is, a delicious, puddingy, chocolatey, cakey dessert.
Flip upside down to serve
Honey Chocolate Pudding Cake

-pudding
1/2 cup honey
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups milk
1/8 tsp cinnamon

-cake
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup milk
2 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350*. Have an 8x8 pyrex cake pan ready. 
In a small saucepan, mix the pudding ingredients together over low heat, and heat, stirring occasionally, until it comes to a boil, but do not let boil over. (it will try to if you let it)
While the pudding ingredients are heating, mix the cake batter. Blend the dry ingredients together in a small bowl, make a well in the middle, and add the wet ingredients. Do not mix into a batter until the pudding mixture comes to a boil.
When the pudding mixture comes to a boil, pour it into the 8x8 cake pan. Quickly blend the cake ingredients together to make a batter, and drop by scant teaspoonfulls evenly across the top of the pudding mixture.
Bake at 350* for about 25 minutes, until the pudding on the bottom seems to be boiling well, and the top of the cake seems cooked and dry. Some of the pudding may boil through onto the top, this is fine.
Remove the cake from the oven and let cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. The cooling time is very important to allow the pudding to thicken, otherwise the bottom will be more milky instead of puddingy.
With a large spoon, scoop cake and pudding out onto small plates. This cake is great by itself, but even better with whipped cream or ice cream.
This cake is very rich, so a little goes a long way. If you have leftovers, the cake is also good cold and stores well in the fridge... until someone with a spoon comes along and devours it, that is.

Some of the Cake has been devoured
Batter and Pudding ready to go












-A note on cocoa powder. The first three times I made this recipe, I used Ghirardelli cocoa powder. It was delicious. This last time, (the only time I remembered to take pictures), I used Hershey's "special dark" cocoa powder. The result was... less than stellar. I purchased the hersheys only because the store was out of Ghirardelli cocoa powder. It is much darker than regular cocoa powder, and smells as though they achieved this by burning some (if not all) of the cocoa beans to charcoal. It is unpleasant, bitter, dark, and does not taste like chocolate (but then again, when has hersheys ever tasted like chocolate?).
In conclusion, you can use a little less than a cup of high quality cocoa powder and make a dessert that is worthy of the gods, or you can use the same amount of cheap cocoa powder and have a dessert that is merely 'meh'.
It is your choice.Choose wisely.
-Zay

2 comments:

  1. oh ah please come home and make this for me! I have a cough and dont want to do anything.and I have to cook breakfast everyday this week . I dont want to be the mom anymore.I want chocolet pudding cake......(big poutty face)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hmmm...this sounds really good. Honey and chocolate, I am hungry!!!!

    ReplyDelete

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