For love of chocolate… pudding. (Recipe!)

~ crossovercreativechaos

I love chocolate. I make no bones about it. It is one of the things that makes life worth living. It is, as the tongue in cheek say, health food; I have chocolate, other people live. They stay healthy.

I also have more food allergies than I like to shake sticks at, including one that may be somewhat odd: milk proteins.

Not lactose. (Lactose-free milk is a disaster.) Not milk products – at least, not if they’ve been munched on by bacteria first. Cheese, sour cream, yogurt; all of those, I can deal, at least in moderation. Which leads to some interesting recipe adaptations, and a lot of frustration when dealing with any frozen yogurt in the grocery store. All too often they say cultured yogurt AND milk, and that’s too risky for comfort….

But I’ve finally got a good adaptation for chocolate pudding. If you have Fannie Farmer, it’s a variation on blancmange.

3 tbsp. cornstarch
4 tbsp. sugar
1.5 cups yogurt
0.5 cup sour cream
6 tbsp. cocoa
1 tsp. vanilla
1 gluten-free graham cracker pie crust

Mix up everything but the vanilla and pie crust in a pot, saucepan, whatever you like to use. Cook it on low heat until it thickens; some people like to use a double-boiler, I just stir often. Once it’s thick, cook another 15 minutes; that tends to take out any lingering “cornstarch” taste.

Once cooked, take it off the heat, and stir in the vanilla. Put all of it into the pie crust, and chill in the fridge.

The trick with this is that yogurt makes the pudding sour, but the pie crust is a lot sweeter than you’d expect. So while as a stand-alone pudding it’s kind of eh, with the crust it balances out just about right. 🙂

If I make this again, I might add a tiny bit more sugar, and more cocoa to make it a more intense chocolate. But this came out surprisingly well.

It’s also stiff enough after it’s chilled to cut off a sliver and eat right out of your hand. 😉 Nom.

 

 

 

42 thoughts on “For love of chocolate… pudding. (Recipe!)”

  1. And now, I’d really like some pudding pie myself.

    And milk protein allergies? Ouch. Allergies in general can make life difficult, but considering everything milk gets tossed into…

    I thankfully don’t have any allergies, though that’s not to say something won’t come up. My eating habits are bad enough as is, for a part of my diet to get cut out due to an allergy would make things difficult.

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    1. Oh yes, reading ingredients lists is a necessity. Milk is in a lot of chocolate, after all… and soy is in more. Whose bright idea was that? Oy.

      Food allergies are annoying and yet more proof that we live on a Death World. As if there were any doubt….

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      1. I think the bright idea behind soy is two-fold: (1) soy is sometimes cheaper than milk and (2) soy is often easier on the systems of the lactose-intorate.

        Also I have noticed manufactors have a habit of putting a thing into everything once they find out how good or well in works in X thing.

        Or are very proud about their thing is free of X . . . when it never had X to begin with. (Seriously, there are a lot of products bragging about being gluten free when they never had gluten in the first place).

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      3. My little sister is allergic to soy. Started when she was 16, and has only gotten worse. Skin contact causes a rash, actually eating any numbs her throat and causes swelling… And yes, it’s in damn near everything.

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  2. I empathize as a fellow milk protein allergy victim (I am so jealous you can eat things like sour cream!)

    If you ever want/need to swap recipes, I am a ridiculously avid baker/cook, always dairy-free!

    Incidentally, you can now by evaporated coconut milk and sweet&condensed coconut milk on Amazon! I plan to make a German chocolate cake for the first time in 15 years this weekend!

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    1. In moderation, though.

      Thanks! Part of my problem with recipes is I have a ridiculous number of “better not eat that” foods. Including – and this is a major stumper for gluten-free cookies – date paste.

      But the condensed coconut milk sounds interesting!

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      1. Oh I know exactly what you mean. I don’t want my dessert to taste healthy. If I can taste the substitutions, that’s a problem. I do a lot of baking with earth balance as a butter substitute. You can make really good chocolate mousseline cream with that. Alice Medrich is my pastry chef of choice to follow and a lot of her recipes work dairy-free with minimal substitutions.

        Vahlrona and Guittard are good bets for darker/semi-sweet to bittersweet.

        Or, by-the-by, I recall you end up in the Bay Area from time to time? There is a fantastic chocolatier in Palo Alto who will take custom orders for allergy-friendly truffles (call a day or two in advance of pick up). Dark chocolate passionate fruit or hazelnut praline truffles, for example, all dairy-free…

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  3. Thankfully not many allergies here, but that is harsh. Have you tried Amber Lynn’s dark chocolate? Unfortunately while they don’t add extra sugar to the milk, it’s, well. Milk chocolate.

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  4. Recipe sounds yummy. 🙂

    Might give it a whirl one day.

    I feel for you on the allergies.

    I don’t have any food allergies. Not yet anyway. Through given how sensitive I am to onions (and not just when I’m cutting them), that might change.

    And my body more than makes up for with being allergic to whole lot of other things. Laundry detergent and other laundry stuff used on my clothes and bedding has to be dye or fragrance free. Because they give me very nasty rashes otherwise. Same thing with my deodorant – and there is only one that we have found that is free of dyes and fragrances.

    Some things I can have dyes and fragrances in but only if the said substances aren’t very strong and I have to test them to make sure. Like something lightly scented with coconut and even some flowers is often fine but even fragrances I can tolerate have a limit – too much and I’m sneezing, coughing, wheezing, and itching with hives and a rash.

    Some anti-itch, anti-rash creams actually give me rashes. Painful, burning rashes.

    The most of the rest is molds, mildew, and all manner of pollen.

    And for added fun, penicillin and its relatives. My mom isn’t allergic to penicillin but she is allergic to a lot of other antibiotics. To the point, where it is often easier to say what she ISN’T allergic to.

    I don’t like the taste of it when I tried before the allergy but since the mold in blue cheese is a member of the penicillin family, I’m likely allergic to blue cheese.

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    2. Hm, I’m allergic to amoxicillin, so I feel your pain. I didn’t discover this until the last day of a 30-day antibiotic regimen… and when I started coming up with the rash, I didn’t realize it was an allergic reaction because I also have psoriasis, so I thought I was just breaking out yet again. I finished the pills like an idiot, and ended up with swelling and hives so badly I probably should have gone to the hospital. I took a double dose of Benadryl and went to sleep instead
      (In retrospect, I really hope my parents were checking to make sure I was still breathing while I was asleep, because Benadryl knocks me out like a light. It really amazes me that I’ve survived as long as I have)

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      1. Ouch. That sounds like it was pretty scary.

        I was halfway between my course. I took my morning dose, went to the store with my parents and had hives all across my back in short order.

        Mom recognized them as hives because (1) nurse and (2) if I get rashes and such, they are allergy related.

        Assuming you were breaking out again when you have psoriasis sounds like a logical conclusion to me.

        Benadryl knocks me out too.

        I think most people can look back on at least one event in their lives and go “How I am not dead?”

        Not to mention dope smack or facepalm about their past selves’ actions. “Argh, I was such an idiot when I was X.”

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  5. Gah, food allergies. I’m lucky on the dairy/soy/etc. front, but I have issues when it comes to seafood. It started off as just giving me a stomachache, but has now progressed to my throat starting to swell shut. This means there are whole ranges of food I have to either avoid or be sure to ask about or check the label on. For example, there’s fish paste in most curries. Also, something I just learned yesterday (*after* I’d eaten the meal), Worcestershire sauce contains sardines. Fortunately my reaction was of the feeling sick type rather than the can’t breathe type that time. In the future, when I make that recipe, I’m going to hunt down vegetarian Worcestershire sauce.

    To make things even better, my grass and pollen allergies are bad enough that they’ve started crossing over into food allergies as well. Apparently some plants are closely enough related that outdoor allergies can cause problems with certain foods. So now I can’t eat watermelon, am avoiding other melons to be safe, and try to only eat celery when it’s cooked. And really, really hope the food list doesn’t expand.

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    1. Melons are terrible things, and so are raw veggies.

      I’ve been making my own laundry detergent, because I obviously have too much time on my hands: one bar of Fels-naphtha soap, shedded and minced in a food processor, one cup each borax, washing soda, and baking soda. Works great, doesn’t bother my skin, and can be made in larger batches by doubling orctrebling the recipe. The food processor is the greatest initial expense.

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    2. Ah yes. Worcestershire sauce is a fish sauce, most people just don’t realize that.

      And yes. Grass and pollen are notorious for doing that – especially since you end up swallowing them as well just because they’re in the air. Did you know dogs can come down with grass pollen allergy too? Oy….

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      1. Some people who think they are allergic to grass are actually allergic to the stuff released by newly cut grass. That smell is geraniol, and it is in lots of fruits and flowers and perfumes as well as grasses.

        I had that for a while. In my family it usually manifests as a few years of “rose fever,” and then goes away as we get older.

        Still allergic to some pollen and dust, though.

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  6. I share the perfume allergy with most of my family(Mine is odd, fruit is fine, floral is evil, peppermint or vanilla is fine, musk or anything citrus is horrid), we use arm and hammer unscented and vinegar for the softener. And the mold, penicillin, annoyingly rye(which because it’s not a common allergy, doesn’t end up on a lot of ingredient lists, so people will make “wheat” tortillas with rye…), the DPT shot and the worst of all, asthma medication in inhalers/air machines. Yeah, that was a fun discovery. And benadryl doesn’t put me to sleep, I really wish it did, though, two days minimum of no sleep/misfiring nerves kind of make me really wary of using it til I have to.

    And for the chocolate, I know in baking school, we could buy nibs, which are basically just chocolate with nothing added. Bitter as all heck, but they are really nice to cook with if you want to control the ingredients. Or straight chocolate discs, which are smoother, melt better, but again no extra ingredients.

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      1. Never really tried it, my thing for minor attacks is hot coffee, which because everything but rye hits my lungs first helps. Rye is my I’m not going to work for three days stuff if I eat it, but I can work with it all day long.

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  7. Oh how awful to have for allergies. We have some in in our family, environmental and medical. Scariest was the antibiotic that nearly stopped our daughter’s breathing. She can’t take any of the more common ones. And grass allergies, and I’ve got what seems to be the ‘fodmap’ problem which means lots of foods are on the minimal amounts list. including onion and garlic and mushrooms. (flavored oils are ok, which helps.)

    on the chocolate dessert front, if you can eat creme fraiche – it’s a variation on sour cream, and you can make it yourself to be sure it’s cultured – I have an excellent chocolate tart recipe. Also some yummy non-wheat chocolate brownies. It uses rice flour and lots of eggs. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll post them.

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      1. oh, that’s bad. i have some eggless dessert recipes, but they call for things with milk solids – butter, condensed milk – I know there are so-called egg substitutes out there, but have never tried them. so far no one in the family needs them.

        Scharffenberger unsweetened chocolate (available now on Amazon) is dairy free, and very high quality.

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  9. Allergies are horrid I agree. Idle thought can you eat cream cheese? If not the cake base of a recipe I have still tastes good on its own. And you probably know a work around or substitute for it. I have made the following with gluten free flour mixes and it still tastes good, although I over baked them so they were a little bit dryer than expected.

    Cream cheese mixture
    8 oz cream cheese
    1 egg
    1/2 cup sugar
    1/8 tsp salt
    Cream together with a mixer until smooth
    6 oz chocolate chips
    Fold in chocolate chips

    Cake batter
    Mix together the following in a separate bowl
    1 1/2 cups flour
    1 tsp baking soda
    1/2 tsp salt
    1 cup sugar
    1/4 cup cocoa powder

    Mix together in a seperate bowl
    1 cup water
    1/3 cup oil
    1 Tbsp white vinegar
    1 Tbsp vanilla

    Combine wet and dry ingredients in a bowl.

    Fill cup cake liners two thirds of the way with batter and top with cream cheese mixture.

    Cook in 350 degree fareinheiht oven for 10 to 15 minutes if using mini cupcake liners longer if using large cupcakes or having a sheet pan mix.

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