I am four years old and sitting at the wooden table in my grandmother’s kitchen in Slavonia, northern Croatia. I’m on holiday there from Australia with my mum. My legs are zig-zagging under the table from excitement because I know that I’m about to be served my absolute favourite dish – chocolate pudding with red currants – and not the packet stuff, this is the real thing.
My gran puts the ceramic dish in front of me, the spring of red currants from her garden laid across the silken chocolate top. I don’t wait long. My spoon dives in, careful to get one red currant into the spoonful of pudding so that the currant erupts in my mouth.
The pudding is smooth, cool and rich and just perfect. And here’s the recipe, I hope you love this recipe as much as I do. Any kind of tart, berry fruit works well as a topping and because I couldn’t find red currants I used raspberries and freeze-dried strawberries.
Ingredients:
- 100 grams of caster sugar (sifted to get rid of all the lumps)
- Two tablespoons of cocoa powder
- Three tablespoons of cornflour
- Quarter teaspoon of salt
- 100 grams of dark cooking chocolate, chopped into small pieces
- Three cups of milk, full cream
- 25 grams of unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- One teaspoon of vanilla paste
- Any kind of red berry that you like, to serve
Method:
- In a heavy-based medium saucepan, mix the sugar, cocoa powder, cornflour and salt.
- Add the milk and transfer to stovetop, set on low heat and whisk everything together. Keep whisking until the mixture starts to thicken. You can’t stop whisking and don’t go changing the temperature to a higher setting so that it heats faster, leave it on low and just whisk (it’s a great arm workout)
- When the mixture has thickened and starts to bubble and boil, keep whisking non-stop for about 30 seconds, take it off the heat and add the chocolate pieces, butter and vanilla paste.
- Whisk until all the ingredients are smooth. You may want to put it through a sieve to get any lumps out, but if you have whisked constantly you won’t need to do this.
- Pour your pudding into the serving dish, or individual dishes and allow to cool until it stops steaming, then lightly cover with cling-wrap to stop a skin forming (I do love a pudding skin though!)
- Put in the fridge overnight (or atleast three-four hours depending on the size of the dishes) and serve with berries on top. You can also serve it warm, after it has stopped steaming. I like it both warm or cold, but warm is quite nice for these colder nights we are having in Sydney.
Let me know if you tried this chocolatey treat and what you thought?
Dobar Tek! Zivjeli! (Bon Appetit! Cheers and let’s live!)
The Croatian Kitchen 