Located in How Easy is That?

For my next recipe, I decided to make another dessert.

As you may recall, I purchased a tart pan from Williams-Sonoma last week and I decided that it was time to break it in! By the way, this recipe was made on Saturday morning, so I didn’t wait very long to give it it’s first use!

Ina has many tarts sprinkled throughout her cookbooks. Some of them are savory, but most are sweet, desserts. However, I wanted chocolate! So I found the Chocolate Pudding Cream Tart inside the How Easy Is That? cookbook. I gathered my ingredients and everything was going to plan, until one step…..

The recipe requires that you combine the scalded milk with the egg mixture in your stand mixture. Which went swimmingly: I poured the milk in slowly and had the mixer on stir so it wouldn’t scramble the eggs, which it didn’t. However, after doing that, Ina says you need to cook the mixture over the stove until it thickens. Her recipe says cook it for 5 to 10 minutes.

Well…I cooked it. But after 8 minutes on the stove with constant stirring, it had thickened a bit so I thought it was ready. I removed it from the heat and continued on with the recipe by adding the chocolate and butter and whisking until it turned into a nice chocolate-y pool of goodness!

(Or so I thought)

I then poured the mixture into the prepared tart pan with its cooked graham cracker shell, put the plastic wrap on it, and shoved it in the fridge to cool/harden. After about an hour, I checked on it and it was still pretty liquidy, but Ina says it will take around six hours to completing become pudding consistently so I didn’t worry too much.

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However, when it reached Hour 5 and not much had changed I did begin to worry!

I didn’t want chocolate milk and I didn’t want to lose the whole thing, so I placed the tart pan in the freezer for the final hour.

It did freeze, but when I cut into it about 90 minutes later, I realized my problem. The custard didn’t cook long enough and thus thicken properly. I was so disappointed that this one didn’t work out. I was really hoping that my first experience making a tart would be a success.

Also, it was the first recipe that I was failed by Ina, I feel like. Prior to starting this blog, I made a few of her recipes here and there and everything always came out amazingly. But not this time. While I know this isn’t technically Ina’s fault, I am still disappointed. I think I am more disappointed over the fact that I feel like I have failed Ina.

However, I wanted this recipe to be good and turn out okay, so I’ve decided I’m going to make it again at some point. In fact, I already bought the chocolate. I just need to get the whole milk, which is a necessity when making this since anything but whole milk won’t cook and set properly.

So there you have it! My first “fail.”

But I plan to march onward and try again and continue to make more recipes. After all, this experience is so that I could learn something, after all!