A guide for cooking this decadent chocolate pudding recipe

This dessert almost broke recipe developer Alison Adams ... but she turned it into a masterpiece.

The vision was simple: we wanted to create our ooziest, most chocolatey pudding ever. Chocolate sauce on the bottom, covered by chocolate pudding, topped with whole blocks of molten chocolate.

But this was the kicker: we wanted the chocolate to keep its shape and still look like solid blocks of chocolate until the moment the spoon hit the surface. It wasn’t easy.

It took recipe tests, 18 hours, 24 blocks of chocolate and 8 puddings before our team came up with the winning formula.

Senior food consultant Alison Adams, who was tasked with the not-at-all-easy task of creating this mythical pudding we fantasised about, says: “I knew it tasted good, and I love the finished result, but it took a lot of attempts to get there.”

Taste's amazing chocolate pudding.

The recipe images you don’t normally see

To let you in on our kitchen secrets, Alison has revealed a blooper reel of some of the puddings that didn’t quite work.

Pudding 1: I started with a simple self-saucing choc pudding recipe and added three different types of cream-filled chocolate, thinking we’d just go along with three blocks of the type that worked best.

Taste's chocolate pudding failure one.

As you can see, this chocolate either shrivelled or exploded when baked.

Pudding 2: Next thought: let’s just try with a simple caramello (mainstream caramel-filled chocolate bar). I’ll just use two blocks and see how it works.

Yikes. Not what we had in mind. Once again it dried, exploded and became kind of powdery.

Taste's chocolate pudding failure two.

Pudding 3: Another attempt: three non-filled, classic white, milk and dark Lindt chocolate bars.Chocolate-block-pudding-1

Wow! Look at the different consistencies (due to the different cocoa butter percentages). So dark chocolate it was.

Taste's chocolate pudding failure three.

Chocolate self-saucing pudding with a difference

But that wasn’t the end of it: to make sure the whole pudding worked, it was then down to our food director, Michelle Southan, to test the recipe herself. Again, and again… and again.

“We always like to double check and triple check our recipes,” says Michelle. “So when asked to give this chocolate pudding a go I couldn’t resist.

Michelle spent a long time working out the liquid ratio for the self-saucing part and hit upon 1 1/2 cups of boiling water as the perfect amount, although she says you could easily add a 1/2 cup more if you like your sauce runnier.

She adds: “The beauty of this pudding is you have two sauces: one underneath the pudding, plus the shimmering, just-melted blocks of chocolate on the top. They’re just asking for a spoon to be plunged straight in.”

And here it is, the finished result: our triple chocolate block pudding.

And now we’ve done all our testing it’s over to you to test it yourself. Get the recipe here. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed tasting all the ones that didn’t quite make it!

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For more recipe ideas, go to taste.com.au or check out the Taste Test Kitchen now.

Originally published as A guide for cooking this decadent chocolate pudding recipe