Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Recipe: Vegan Chocolate Pudding Pie

I'm not a vegan, but I do happen to eat a lot of vegan food.  Whether it's by chance or choice, I think I've gotten fairly good at creating all kinds of vegan dishes.  I'm especially fond of vegan baked goods, so I'm always up for trying out a new recipe.

Vegan Chocolate Pudding Pie
But maybe trying out a new recipe for Thanksgiving was a bad idea.

My original plan for Thanksgiving was to make a vegan pumpkin pie.  But my boyfriend's mother informed me that she'd be bringing a pumpkin roll to dinner, and we just couldn't have two pumpkin desserts.  So then I decided to make a vegan sour cream coffee cake that I've made multiple times and everyone loves and an experimental vegan pudding pie. 

But I forgot the vegan sour cream at the store and decided to just go with the recipe I'd found at The Post Punk Kitchen for Old Fashioned Chocolate Pudding Pie.  (I love you Isa!)  In my delusional mind I thought pudding pie = easy.  And in some cases it does.  But normally when you aren't making your pudding from scratch. 

Have you ever made pudding from scratch?  It's really, really hard to do.  It took me two attempts to make the pudding for this pie.  I burned the first batch (and nearly burned down my kitchen!  looks like I'll be needing a new saucepan from Santa, too)  and used a cooking technique that my boyfriend's home ec teaching mother would definitely frown upon.  I needed to whisk my pudding mixture, and since my hand whisking didn't work the first time, I used my mixer in the pan on the stove.  Dangerous, I know.  But it seemed to work.

My second batch of filling didn't burn and seemed like it would set up ok, so I poured it into my store bought graham cracker crust, sprinkled some vegan chocolate chips on the crust, and hoped for the best.  I had some extra pudding left over so I put it in a ramekin to eat later.  The leftover pudding ended up tasting vegan, so I was pretty worried about how my pie would do the next day.

And what happened you ask?  The pie ended up being pretty tasty.  The filling didn't firm up the way I wanted it to, but that was probably because I put a lid on it too soon after the pudding came off of the stove, and I didn't give it enough time to just set up on my counter top.  But it definitely had a rich, chocolately flavor, even if it was a little tough to eat.  (the crust also got a little soggy, but it wasn't anything that eating it with a spoon couldn't fix)

This recipe is one of many delicious sounding recipes from the new cookbook Vegan Pie in the Sky by my favorite vegan cookbook authors - Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I hope to try out a couple more recipes over the holidays.  But I'll probably try them out at least once before I serve them up to a crowd.

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