For the next three months the folks over at My Baking Addiction and Good Life Eats are hosting a Holiday Recipe exchange.  Each week is sponsored by a different company and has a minimum $150 valued prize.  Pretty cool, right?  We all like prizes, right?  Right.

What’s even cooler, though, is that this week’s sponsor is Scharffen Berger chocolate!  I don’t know if I’ll have the stamina or sheer cooking prowess to complete three months worth of recipes, but I do think that there’s always time for a chocolate-laden recipe.  Especially Scharffen Berger.  And, to kind of top everything off, I knew had a brick of 99% Scharffen Berger sitting in my cupboard from many moons ago, lonely and waiting to be used.  Today was its lucky day.

But O, what to make?  A cake?  Dear god, enough with the chocolate cake already!  @.@  Cookies?  Meh.  Bars?  Blah.

Then I caught a glimpse of A Thought For Food‘s guest post on Journey Kitchen regarding chocolate pudding.  Pudding?  Now there’s something I could get into!  Pudding is always a nice feel-good treat.

Originally I was going to make chocolate pudding with a pumpkin pudding swirl; I’d make one batch of each and simply swirl one into the other.  After some brainstorming, though, I thought that sounded a bit simplistic and lame…plus it sounded like a lot of dirty dishes (lazy). >.>  So instead I started cobbling together a recipe that would integrate the two.  Pumpkin spices and chocolate definitely seemed like they would go together (plus pumpkin only seems to add delicious creaminess to food), so I figured I couldn’t really go wrong.

I was totally right.

   

Delightfully, the recipe (based off of the one from Flour) was easy to execute and came out great on my first try (hooray!).  I tinkered with the Flour recipe to suit the ingredients I already had in my fridge, as well as to accommodate some seasonal flair – pumpkin, cinnamon and nutmeg.  I must have gotten the ratios of everything right because you really could taste all the different flavors – even the pumpkin!  I thought the 99% Scharffen Berger might overwhelm everything else, but while it was rich all the flavors still stood on their own.  Go team, go.

In the above pictures you can see the major basic steps: first, mixing the heated cream with the melted chocolate, second, whisking together the egg yolks and spices, and third heating the entire mixture until it thickens into a wonderful pudding (tasty both warm and cold, for the record).  It’s great when recipes are easy.

I think I’ll definitely be making this for Thanksgiving dessert this year (I’ve already volunteered myself); it’s creamy and delicious with excellent hints of spice.  Though next time I make it, I’ll probably ratchet the Scharffen Berger back to a trusty 70%…sometimes srs chocolate is just too srs for pudding.

Thanks to Emily for taking the puddin’ photos!

Choco-Pumpkin Pudding Recipe

Serves ~6.

Ingredients:

• 3  cups of heavy whipping cream
• 6 egg yolks
• 1/2 can (7.5 oz) of pumpkin puree
• 9 oz bittersweet chocolate (I used 99% Scharffen Berger…I recommend using 70%)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Instructions:

1. Scald the whipping cream over medium-high heat.

2. Melt the chocolate in a double-boiler.

3. Pour heated cream over the chocolate and stir until thoroughly mixed.

4. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg in a separate bowl.

5. Slowly pour the hot cream/chocolate mixture into the egg/sugar mixture, stirring constantly.

6. Mix in the pumpkin.

7. Return the entire mixture to the saucepan and cook on medium-low heat, stirring constantly to keep from burning, for 5-6 minutes or until thickened (should coat the back of a spoon).

8. Strain through a fine mesh, then pour into a bowl.  Mix in the vanilla and salt.

9. Place plastic wrap directly against the pudding to prevent a skin from forming and refrigerate for 3 hours or until cold.

10.  CONSUME!