Chocolate Blender Pudding and An Update

So, I know that I said before that I didn't like pudding.  After today, however, I'm thinking what I probably meant was that I don't like Jello pudding or whatever.  Even with my usual pudding ambivalence, when I saw this recipe for Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Blender Pudding on Always Order Dessert, I had to try it right away.  It just sounded so great!  And, as it turns out, it is pretty great.

I did change a few thing from the original recipe.  The biggest change was leaving out the peanut butter, since Kevin doesn't like it and I wanted to share.  I also used semisweet chips instead of bittersweet since that's what they had in the store, and a combination of half and half and 1% milk instead of whole milk since that's what I had in my house.  I also halved the recipe since I only needed to feed pudding to the boy and myself.

You start out by combining the chocolate chips, vanilla, and egg in your blender.

My blender is by no means awesome, it's one of those little personal sized one, but it handled the chocolate chips well enough.  Blend until the chocolate is chopped up into tiny pieces.

It will look like sludge, but it will smell like delicious.  While you're blending away, you can also start heating up your milk in a saucepan.

Give it a stir every now and then to keep a skin from forming on top and to keep the bottom from scorching. Once it starts bubbling slightly, pour it into your blender on top of your chocolate mixture.

Blend until the heat of the milk melts the chocolate.  The original recipe says to go for about 3 minutes, so that's what I did.  Also apparently the heat of the milk will also cook the egg, so that's good to know.  At the end of my 3 minutes, this is what I had:

It was kind of the consistency of thick hot chocolate, but nowhere near as thick as Alejandra's pictures on Always Order Dessert indicated.  I'm thinking this may have been because I omitted the peanut butter.  But, Alejandra said that the pudding would thicken upon cooling, so I divided the mixture into 2 cups, covered them with foil, and stuck them in the refrigerator.

The original recipe says to let the pudding chill for 30 minutes in the fridge.  However, I found that I needed to let mine chill for WAAAAAY longer.  I pretty much had to let it sit overnight before it reached anything like pudding consistency.  Again, I'm assuming this was a function of the lack of peanut butter.

Finally it was eating time!  The one thing I noticed right away was that, although it had thickened considerably in the refrigerator, it still wasn't really pudding texture.  It was very light and airy, almost like a chocolate mousse.  Again I'm blaming this on the absent peanut butter - not that I'm complaining.  Chocolate mousse is the bomb and I was more than happy to eat it.

The other thing I'll say is that while it was delicious, it was very rich and eating my entire portion gave me a little bit of a stomach ache.  The original recipe says it serves 4-6; I would probably say that aiming for 6 would result in more manageable portion sizes.

Also!  A little while ago I made a promise to myself and the universe that I would lose 4 lbs by September 23rd.  I am happy to report that not only did I surpass that number, I almost doubled it!  My next goal is to lose another 10 lbs by Halloween (to accomplish this I will probably have to not eat so much pudding...).  I'll be back with another update when the time comes :).