Cakes & Bakes: Slow-cooker chocolate rice pudding

With the recent cold and snowy conditions outside, we’ve been ramping up our dinners with hot desserts. We’ve enjoyed home-made rice pudding twice this week; the first was a baked one, cooked in the oven. The one we’re sharing here is a chocolate rice pudding, made in a slow-cooker.

Rice pudding is probably one of the most ‘un-labour-intensive’ desserts you can make. You practically switch on your slow-cooker, pour all the ingredients into the bowl, give it a stir, put the lid on and leave it for a couple of hours. You can lift the lid, take a peek and give it a stir if you want… but even that isn’t completely necessary.

After 3 or so hours, you’ll have hot, creamy, chocolatey rice pudding ready to enjoy. I like to eat mine hot and quite thick, Justin prefers his cool and a thinner consistency. How do you prefer yours?

The good thing about making rice pudding in a slow-cooker (rather than baking in an oven) is that, as it’s cooking, if it’s looking to thick for your taste, you can add a little bit more milk and stir every so often to make sure it’s just as you like it.

Make sure you use short-grain pudding rice or Italian Arborio rice. It’s a lot more absorbent than long grain rice and produces a creamy pudding with firm grains.

Click here or on the image below to save my slow-cooker chocolate rice pudding to Pinterest

Slow-cooker chocolate rice pudding

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Cook Time 3

Course Dessert

Cuisine British

Servings 4 servings

Equipment

Slow cooker

Ingredients

50 g unsalted butter
100 g pudding rice
500 ml milk full cream
3 tbsp cocoa powder
300 ml double cream
75 g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

Turn on the slow-cooker to high and add the butter
When the butter has melted, add the pudding rice, stirring to coat all the grains
Add about a ¼ of the milk and stir
Once the slow-cooker contents have warmed up again, add the cocoa powder and stir well to combine
Pour in the rest of the milk, followed by the cream stirring to mix in. Put the lid on and let the contents warm up again
Once warm, add the caster sugar, stirring to dissolve
Stir in the vanilla extract. Replace the lid
Cook for 3 hours. After the first hour, you could stir the pudding to make sure the consistancy it to your liking. If it's too thick, add a little more milk and replace the lid. Repeat after another hour and again, just before it's finished cooking

Slow-cooker chocolate rice pudding ingredients

Keyword chocolate, rice, rice pudding

Cakes & Bakes: Toasted coconut & white chocolate blondies

We have a lovely glass cake dome which usually sits on the dining room windowsill. Normally, it houses a tasty treat to accompany our afternoon cuppa, but it’s been empty for about 2 weeks now… and there’s nothing worse than an empty cake dome. A tray of these delicious toasted coconut & white chocolate blondie was the perfect quick solution to the crisis!

“What’s a ‘blondie’?”, I hear you say. Well, it’s like a brownie but without the addition of cocoa or milk/dark chocolate. It also usually includes brown sugar, but I used white caster sugar so it wouldn’t overpower the flavours of the white chocolate and coconut.

Pre-toasting the dessicated coconut really brings out the nutty flavour – don’t leave out this initial stage. Plus, it makes your kitchen smell heavenly!

The milk chocolate chunks give the blondies a luscious, creamy mouth-feel. You could use a bag of white chocolate chips instead, if you prefer. I like biting into the odd big chunk.

It’s a really delicious treat, and really quick to mix and cook… an hour, tops.

Click here or on the image below to save my toasted coconut & white chocolate blondie recipe to Pinterest