This recipe is dead simple and always a hit. It’s gluten-free, dairy-free, and packed with protein, so it’s perfect for anyone who needs extra protein, including kids and older adults.
Tools:
- Blender or high-speed mixer
- Ceramic or glass bowl for melting the chocolate in the microwave
- Spatula for scraping the chocolate into the blender
- Bowl or serving dish with cover for refrigerating the pudding
Ingredients:
- 1 container of silken tofu
- 1 cup of plain soy milk (I use Trader Joe’s plain soy milk)
- 2 tbsp real maple syrup
- 1 tbsp real vanilla extract
- ½ tsp almond extract
- 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chunks or chips (I use the “Enjoy Life” brand)
Steps:
- Put everything except the chocolate (the tofu, soy milk, maple syrup, vanilla, and almond extract) into the blender and blend well for about 2 minutes.
- Put the chocolate in a glass or ceramic bowl and microwave it for 30 seconds. Stir it with the spatula. Keep putting it back in for another 30 seconds and taking it out to stir until it is all smooth with no lumps. NOTE: Do NOT microwave the chocolate until it is very hot and melts without stirring. You will find with some dedicated stirring that you can get rid of the lumps before it gets super hot. (Getting it too hot will risk burning the chocolate.) In general, it takes me 1.5-2.0 minutes in total to get the chocolate warm enough that I can stir out all the lumps, but your microwave may be slower than mine.
- Quickly pour most of the chocolate into the blender and immediately blend it for another 2 minutes. (You have to work quickly at this step because otherwise the hot chocolate meeting the cold mixture can turn the chocolate into grainy lumps. So you have to blend them together fast.)
- Once that’s blended well, scrape the rest of the chocolate into the blender and blend for another minute. (The point of this extra step is to avoid the grainy lumps mentioned in step #3. If you try to scrape all the chocolate into the blender in step #3, you will take too long and get grainy lumps.)
- Pour into a bowl or serving dish, cover it, and put it in the fridge for 2 hours or more. This keeps for days.
A few notes:
- I find it impossible to get all the pudding out of the blender with any device other than my hand, so I just use my hand to get as much of the pudding into the bowl as I can. I admit I then lick my hand clean and add some soy milk to the blender, blend it up, and and enjoy the remains as a slightly chocolatey glass of milk. This also makes it easier to clean the blender.
- You can adjust the ingredients to your preference in terms of consistency, sweetness, chocolate intensity, etc.
- Once you get used to making this, you really don’t need to measure the ingredients. Just estimate it all and reduce the clean-up. It’s a very forgiving recipe.
- I make this in a Beast blender because it make it easy to top and put in the fridge, but you can use any blender.
- You can sub in other kinds of milk, including dairy, almond, etc. The soy milk I use is just soybeans and water (available at Trader Joe’s), because of my dietary restrictions. If you use a milk that is sweet, note you may want to add less sweetener.
- If you can’t find silken (soft) tofu, you can use a firmer tofu but you will need to add more of all the other ingredients, especially the soy milk, so it’s not too thick. Best to use silken if you can find it.
Serving ideas:
I usually serve this with some fresh raspberries on top and with some chocolate shavings added. My son loves it with mini chocolate chips mixed in. My young friend Patsy likes it drizzled with a raspberry sauce (fresh raspberries cooked down with a little sugar). My friend Stu enjoys it with dry-roasted almond or pecan bits plus fresh fruit on top. My mother tops it with anything I offer and then adds a mountain of whipped cream.
I have sometimes used this as a frosting for vanilla cakes. In that case, I make it a little thicker by using less soy milk.
You can also make other flavors of this, like vanilla or strawberry, by just subbing in different ingredients. But none is as good as the chocolate version.