Homemade Pots of Joy
Mar. 5th, 2014 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelvisYesterday, I found out that Cadbury makes Pots of Joy, the equivalent of creme egg pudding. As a longtime creme egg fan, I knew I had to try these … but I quickly discovered that like my beloved Cadbury Twisted bars, Pots of Joy are not available in the United States. (In fairness, you can get Twisteds by mail through Amazon and other outlets. But you can't walk up to your local drugstore and buy them, which is the problem.)
Anyway, the point here is that I was being denied creme egg-flavored pudding, and clearly this was just wrong. Fortunately, I am capable of making pudding. So I did.
First thing first: locate simple pudding recipes. I've made custard-based pudding on many occasions, and don't consider it terribly hard. However, it still seemed like overkill for replicating a refrigerated dessert probably filled with all kinds ofdelicious chemicals, though anyone who wants a gussied-up Pot of Joy is certainly welcome to try a custard-based option and report back. I instead went with cornstarch-thickened puddings, which come together very quickly and suit my inherent laziness.
Step One: Vanilla Pudding
For the vanilla option, I went with 2/3 of a recipe of Smitten Kitchen's vanilla bean pudding. Cadbury creme egg filling is very sweet, and has a strong confectioner's sugar taste to me, so I decided to sub confectioner's sugar (aka icing or powdered sugar in other parts of the world) for the regular granulated sugar and reduce the cornstarch slightly. (Note: Wikipedia suggests that icing sugar in the UK does not contain cornstarch.)
Like many Smitten Kitchen recipes, the vanilla pudding was very easy to make. However, it didn't taste sweet or vanilla-ey enough for me; let's face it, Cadbury creme eggs aren't exactly subtly flavored. I ultimately ended up adding more confectioner's sugar and vanilla at the end, as well as two teaspoons of butter for smoothness and a touch of rich flavor.
So, the proportions for 2/3 of the Smitten recipe, adjusted for what I finally ended up using:
1 1/3 cup whole milk + a scant half-cup of whole milk
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons of cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 of a beaten large egg
2 teaspoons unsalted butter
Note: because I added extra confectioner's sugar at the end when I discovered the pudding wasn't sweet enough, I'd missed my opportunity to reduce the cornstarch accordingly. If you're using confectioner's sugar that includes cornstarch, go with 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon of cornstarch instead.
Once the pudding was done, I put two-thirds of it aside and tinted the rest neon yellow with food coloring. I even dissected a Cadbury mini egg to make sure I got the color right.
Step Two: Chocolate Pudding
Again I went with a Smitten Kitchen recipe: half their best chocolate pudding, made with a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar since you can't really get any closer to the chocolate coating Cadbury puts on its creme eggs. In case you're wondering, if you're making half a recipe, you'll need to chop up 15.4 squares of a 3.5oz Dairy Milk bar. I'm sure you could go with 16 and be fine, but 15.4 is the correct number, and besides, my Dairy Milk bar had broken a square nearly in half, so it was an easy number for me to use.
I put everything in the fridge to chill, which turned out to be a slight tactical error, but I'll get to that next.
Step Three: Assembly
I didn't assemble the layers while they were still warm because I feared everything would spread too much and accidentally mix instead of replicating the Pot of Joy's chocolate top and creme egg bottom. Unfortunately, this left me assembling Pots of Joy out of fairly stiff pudding. However, when assembling something out of pudding you already know to be delicious, your failure mode is still delicious pudding, so really, even if these turned out to be the most hideous layered puddings on the planet, I still won.
I used four 8-ounce ramekins, so I criss-crossed the vanilla puddings with a spoon so that I had four roughly equal segments to use when filling each ramekin. I put 2/3 of a plain vanilla segment on the bottom of the ramekin, followed by a complete segment of yellow vanilla pudding, followed by covering up the yellow with the remaining 1/3 of a segment of plain pudding. This photo shows what things looked like in the middle of that process:
Divide the chocolate pudding into four segments, and top the vanilla pudding with the chocolate pudding, smoothing it out so that you've completely covered the vanilla. Garnish with a mini egg.
And the finished pudding?
Damned good. Tastes like a creme egg, but you can at least pretend it's marginally better for you, because you know exactly what went into it. Sure, I've vastly exceeded my daily calorie limit, but who cares? Sometimes you just need to eat Cadbury creme egg-flavored pudding.
Anyway, the point here is that I was being denied creme egg-flavored pudding, and clearly this was just wrong. Fortunately, I am capable of making pudding. So I did.
First thing first: locate simple pudding recipes. I've made custard-based pudding on many occasions, and don't consider it terribly hard. However, it still seemed like overkill for replicating a refrigerated dessert probably filled with all kinds of
Step One: Vanilla Pudding
For the vanilla option, I went with 2/3 of a recipe of Smitten Kitchen's vanilla bean pudding. Cadbury creme egg filling is very sweet, and has a strong confectioner's sugar taste to me, so I decided to sub confectioner's sugar (aka icing or powdered sugar in other parts of the world) for the regular granulated sugar and reduce the cornstarch slightly. (Note: Wikipedia suggests that icing sugar in the UK does not contain cornstarch.)
Like many Smitten Kitchen recipes, the vanilla pudding was very easy to make. However, it didn't taste sweet or vanilla-ey enough for me; let's face it, Cadbury creme eggs aren't exactly subtly flavored. I ultimately ended up adding more confectioner's sugar and vanilla at the end, as well as two teaspoons of butter for smoothness and a touch of rich flavor.
So, the proportions for 2/3 of the Smitten recipe, adjusted for what I finally ended up using:
1 1/3 cup whole milk + a scant half-cup of whole milk
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons of cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 of a beaten large egg
2 teaspoons unsalted butter
Note: because I added extra confectioner's sugar at the end when I discovered the pudding wasn't sweet enough, I'd missed my opportunity to reduce the cornstarch accordingly. If you're using confectioner's sugar that includes cornstarch, go with 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon of cornstarch instead.
Once the pudding was done, I put two-thirds of it aside and tinted the rest neon yellow with food coloring. I even dissected a Cadbury mini egg to make sure I got the color right.
Step Two: Chocolate Pudding
Again I went with a Smitten Kitchen recipe: half their best chocolate pudding, made with a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar since you can't really get any closer to the chocolate coating Cadbury puts on its creme eggs. In case you're wondering, if you're making half a recipe, you'll need to chop up 15.4 squares of a 3.5oz Dairy Milk bar. I'm sure you could go with 16 and be fine, but 15.4 is the correct number, and besides, my Dairy Milk bar had broken a square nearly in half, so it was an easy number for me to use.
I put everything in the fridge to chill, which turned out to be a slight tactical error, but I'll get to that next.
Step Three: Assembly
I didn't assemble the layers while they were still warm because I feared everything would spread too much and accidentally mix instead of replicating the Pot of Joy's chocolate top and creme egg bottom. Unfortunately, this left me assembling Pots of Joy out of fairly stiff pudding. However, when assembling something out of pudding you already know to be delicious, your failure mode is still delicious pudding, so really, even if these turned out to be the most hideous layered puddings on the planet, I still won.
I used four 8-ounce ramekins, so I criss-crossed the vanilla puddings with a spoon so that I had four roughly equal segments to use when filling each ramekin. I put 2/3 of a plain vanilla segment on the bottom of the ramekin, followed by a complete segment of yellow vanilla pudding, followed by covering up the yellow with the remaining 1/3 of a segment of plain pudding. This photo shows what things looked like in the middle of that process:
Divide the chocolate pudding into four segments, and top the vanilla pudding with the chocolate pudding, smoothing it out so that you've completely covered the vanilla. Garnish with a mini egg.
And the finished pudding?
Damned good. Tastes like a creme egg, but you can at least pretend it's marginally better for you, because you know exactly what went into it. Sure, I've vastly exceeded my daily calorie limit, but who cares? Sometimes you just need to eat Cadbury creme egg-flavored pudding.