Chocolate Pudding -- Tuesdays with Dorie

This is my third week of Tuesdays with Dorie and I love it! I am so happy to be a part of this group and try all of these amazing recipes I might have skipped over cooking through the book on my own. The recipe of the week was chocolate pudding, and this is probably one I would have skipped over, if baking on my own. We like chocolate pudding in our family but it's not something I buy often, usually only for a specific recipe (and I mean the boxed variety, tsk, tsk, I know).

I think this is the first time I've made pudding from scratch, at least in the last 5 years it is. What scared me about this recipe was the eggs! Yikes! I hate eggs. I can't stand the smell, flavor, texture, any way you prepare them I just don't like 'em. I've tried making eggs for my kids because I know they are really healthy, full of protein, etc., but even my kids don't like them. We always have them in the fridge for baking but we never eat eggs plain in our house. At first I thought about trying to skip the eggs in this recipe but I decided not to since that would really change it, I just plugged my way through, not knowing if we would like it in the end. I only have a small food processor (4 cup I think, but not sure) -- so I did this on the stove and in a bunch of bowls. It worked out fine, I whisked away, it came together easily even though there were a lot of steps. I realize that if I was able to process this the texture would have been smoother, but really, there were no lumps or grainy texture without using the food processor, it was perfect smooth pudding texture just whisking it by hand. I do not have a set of ramekins so I just used a glass bowl to set the pudding in.

The kids were excited to try this pudding and I was too...the taste was pretty good, I think I would have rather used all milk chocolate, I could not find bittersweet chocolate, so went with a mix of Ghirardelli milk chocolate, and Lindt excellence 85% cocoa extra dark. I am really a milk chocolate kind of girl, I know, how unchic. The kids happily ate their bowl of pudding after lunch, I thought it was really rich, nice texture, just not too keen on the egg factor :( I think I will search for a home made eggless chocolate pudding recipe since I think we would all enjoy that.