Chocolate Milk Pudding Cake

If you often buy dairy dessert from supermarket, Barcelona is a good place for you. Besides of many choices like pudding, custard, yogurt, yogurt drink, mousse, flavored milk, etc., a more important thing for me is the ingredient. Whole milk and skip milk are always the first ones you see on the list. If they are chocolate flavored, the cocoa butter is included. Although manufactured desserts aren't entirely addictive-free, at least the very major ingredients are good natural food.

It is not the scene I could find in the States. Sugar if not the 1st then would be the 2nd place on ingredient lists. What come next usually are vegetable fat plus a string of weird names which all refer to various processed sugar anyway. During my trip to NJ, I wanted to pick up a box of chocolate milk mix for my friend in Barcelona whose kids love this drink, but I just couldn't bear to see little children drinking vegetable fat, I had to pass it...

Today a few girl friends are coming to visit me. My fridge has Nestle chocolate milk pudding, but serving it in the original plastic tub looks kind of kiddi-o, so I mix the pudding with gelatin, a hour later cut out the pudding jello and place it on store-bought sponge cake. A few easy step can turn the original look a mile different,

Recipe of chocolate milk pudding-jello

(to make 22cm in diameter x 1.5 cm thickness jello sheet, enough to make four of the double-layer mini cakes, each is 5 cm in diameter)

• 10 g unflavored gelatin powder
• 100 ml water, room temperature
• 100 ml boiling water
• 240 g store-bought chocolate milk pudding (mine is Nestle Nesquik)
• 1 9-inch/ 22 cm aluminum round pan

Steps:

1. In a big bowl, combine 100 ml (room temperature) water with the gelatin, stir for 2 minutes
2. Add hot boiling water into the bowl, keep stirring until the gelatin totally dissolves.
3. In another bowl, scoop in a big spoonful (about 50g) of pudding and pour in a bit of gelatin water, keep stirring, and repeat the same steps (don't do it at once in order to avoid the milk pudding curdles) until everything well combine. Pour the mixture into the foil pan and send it to the fridge until the pudding sets. Mine takes about 1 hour.

To assemble the mini cakes

• cut out the side of the foil pan, use a round cookie cutter - mine is 5 cm in diameter -to cut the pudding jello
• use the same cookie cutter to cut the sponge cake.
• Spread little raspberry jam on one side (the rough side) of the cake. Stake up two sponge cakes and two pudding-jellos, but in an alternate order, garnish with chocolate shavings.
• For the sponge cake, I actually use "Pim's" cake (see the photo in the below) since it comes in the right size and already has raspberry jam (under the chocolate), I simple take out the chocolate top and replace with the jello.

  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------