Baked Chocolate Pudding

I don’t like pudding.

*Gasp*

Nope, I don’t like it at all. Not the texture, not the flavor. Especially boxed chocolate pudding. YUCK. I do not like that flavor at all.

I like pudding in things, like pie. Sometimes. I like banana cream pie…as long as there are no chunks of banana in it. But I think that comes from my dislike of slimy bananas more so than my dislike of pudding.

And I’m in good company. My husband hates pudding. More than me. He won’t eat banana cream pie even, but because of the pudding. (Funny side story: the first time I brought my husband-then-boyfriend home to my parents’ house for dinner my mom made banana cream pie. He’s so polite he ate it and also ate the second slice she gave him because he obviously loved it so much. Poor guy!)

Last month in Good Housekeeping, Ina Garten shared some of her Thanksgiving recipes. This baked pudding was one of them. The look of it intrigued me, because the inside was crumbly looking, or so I thought from the teensy-tiny magazine photo.

I decided to make it to give it a try. And oh. My. God. I love pudding now! Well, this kind anyway.

It’s got a crunchy, meringue like top and a chocolatey textured inside, almost like a melted brownie. Or a fudgy brownie. Or maybe it’s more like one of those molten lava things…but without the molten. Unless you heat it in the microwave which I did and ohmygod good things happened when I tasted it.

Anyway you have to make this. I altered her recipe a little and I made it in single-serve ramekins instead of a casserole because, well, there’s only two and a half people in this house and my husband still wouldn’t eat it which means I ate three and a half ramekins of the stuff. Even my daughter loved it. And she’s like her daddy-won’t touch pudding with a ten-foot pole even if it has Oreos and gummy worms in it.

And if you make the pudding you get to lick the bowl. ‘Nuff said.