I’ve been dreaming about Mexican chocolate tofu pudding since Crayton forwarded me the New York Times recipe a few weeks ago. It was my turn on our recipe exchange, so I ditched my Mexican chocolate ice cream idea and told everyone I was making dairy-free pudding. A few people were like, “Wait…. what?” None of us are vegan.
Last night, we feasted before the pudding-making even started. Alice whipped up a batch of pot stickers. Julie brought sweet bread from a Japanese bakery. Tricia brought mini-weenies in barbecue sauce, Joy H. brought spicy guac, and Jesica and Joy V. brought wine. (Which later resulted in extremely blurry churro pictures.)
Jesica graciously offered to let us use two chocolate bars she’d bought in Tabasco. She crushed them on my molcajete….
… and then we melted them in the microwave. They smelled like fresh-baked brownies.
Everything went into the blender, with a box-and-a-half of tofu and some spices.
The result was luscious. It was a creamy, thick, perfect pudding, that required all of five minutes on the stove.
This means a lot to me, because a few months ago I experienced the great Chocolate Pudding Disaster of 2009. I spent hours melting chocolate and worrying about the scalding the milk, only to end up with chocolate soup. I almost swore off chocolate pudding forever after that. But tofu, that wonderful, square-headed, plain block of soy, has saved me.
The churros weren’t as easy. I used a recipe from my 1944 copy of Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, which called for a simple flour-and-water dough. Unfortunately, the tip on my cheap pastry bag came off as we were piping the dough into the oil. (Eeee!) We rigged up a Ziploc bag with duct tape, which worked marvelously. But piping dough got old after awhile. I was hot and sweaty. My house has no air conditioning.
Next time I might just buy churros from the dude on the corner.
The combination, when it was all done, was to die for, so it’s really worth having them both together.
Recipes and cooking notes after the jump.
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