Wednesday brought us to day 3, dish 3 of the Thanksgiving Dessert Bonanza!  The last and final flavor was chocolate, and boy-howdy, did I bring the chocolate (oh…it was totally brought).

FORM OF: Chocolate Pudding Cake!!

My revelation of chocolate pudding cake as the chocolate dessert of choice stemmed, like many of my decisions, from an inability to make a decision.

As soon as I decided I was making pecan bars and a pumpkin pie, I was positive that I wanted to do a cake for my third dessert dish.  But as the week wore on and I found no satisfactory recipe, my mind began to meander into the realms of pudding.  “Man, chocolate pudding sounds awesome”, I said to myself, and began wondering if I should perhaps do a pie with a delicious chocolate pudding-y filling.  I vacillated for awhile until it occurred to me that Google probably had a perfect solution (as it almost always does) for my cake-or-pudding dilemma.  Dutifully typing “chocolate pudding cake” into the search engine, I was immediately inundated with ideas.

This brought me to Sunday Nite Dinner’s Chocolate Blackout Cake recipe.  When this loaded onto my monitor, a light shone from the heavens and angels sang as my stomach rumbled from its sheer awesomeness.  I was sold.

And so, at midnight on Thanksgiving eve, I began baking a chocolate pudding cake.

Naturally one of the first things I did was prepare the cake pans (yay, I was able to find them despite the mess of the new apartment).  Have I ever mentioned how much I love parchment paper?  Yes, I actually have.

For Slackers: I used to hate putting parchment paper into round cake pans until I came across this fantastic tip from Baking Bites.  I’ve been using this technique ever since and it is ridiculous how easy it makes lining your pans.  Definitely take 30 seconds to look at this: it will make your life easier.

I became quickly enamored with this cake recipe for reasons beyond the fact that it looked delicious; it turns out that it was another one of my favorite “mix everything together and put it in a baking pan.”  Very excellent.

Whenever I start a new recipe, I always tend to assume that I’m going to screw it up somewhere along the line.  I’ve learned from my baking experiences and have read frequently that baking really is exact; to do something right, a 1/2 cup of flour is really an exact, leveled-off 1/2 cup, not the closest approximation I can get.  This means that it’s likely I’m going to get something a little off somewhere, especially in a recipe with many ingredients.

But low and behold, I did something right!  Check out these 2 fantastic cakes:

Actually this is a little bit of a lie.  If you’d seen the other side of these cakes, you’d see that their centers are decidedly concave.  Still working on why that happened.  But even with that little mishap, I was impressed.

After the cakes were finished I went to bed (~2am) to let them cool.  The next morning (Thanksgiving) I got back up at 8:30 and started churning out pudding.

I’ve never made pudding from scratch before, and it was an interesting process; I’m a big fan of pudding so it’s definitely something I’ll be trying again.  Not unlike the cakes, I was surprised at the ease in which I accomplished this secondary dessert feat.  To me pudding had always sounded putzy and easy to screw up, but when it came right down to it, as long as you’re able to pay attention, it’s really not that bad.  I suppose that probably applies to any sort of cooking, eh?

Because I have this shot, take a look at my awesome chopping job:

I was a little concerned at first…it looks like I am whisk-less after my move.  This hasn’t been an issue with my cooking until this recipe, but luckily I found a “mini whipper” that I won eons ago from a Pampered Chef party giveaway.  It sufficed (and was fun!).

So after letting the pudding cool for a bit in the fridge and doing a few other morning-time chores, assembly began.  Check this awesome out:

And there was much rejoicing.

Slacker’s Chocolate Pudding Cake

Adapted from Sunday Nite Dinner’s Chocolate Blackout Cake

I call this “Slacker’s” for 2 reasons:

1. I didn’t take the time to brew and add the required coffee for the cake batter.
2. I didn’t take the time to buy/destroy chocolate cookies to sprinkle on top.
3. I didn’t take the time to cut each cake layer in half.
4. I halved the pudding recipe to accommodate #3.  And because I didn’t have enough milk.

So if you want to make a Chocolate Blackout Cake but you don’t want to go full tilt, take the Chocolate Blackout Cake recipe and follow my 4 slacking steps.  And enjoy. ^_^