mocha/cappuccino/whatever pudding cake

Sometimes unpleasant little episodes in life can have long lasting pleasant consequences. Waiting time in a urologist's office, for example. Magazines to browse, what's this "Cooking Light" magazine? Browse, browse, browse, whoa ..., jackpot! Look at this mocha pudding cake. [Imagine terrific killer chocolate dessert photo.] Creamy pudding on the bottom, a tender brownie-like cake on top. Served warm with vanilla ice milk. Food orgasm.

"Mr Jantzen, ..." Back to business.

But this was too good to leave in a doctor's office waiting room and never see again. bob asks for a photocopy. And sends away for a subscription, starting after the eye-opening Jan/Feb 93 issue. Opening up a world of healthier food ideas that has proved far more utilizable in our kitchen than our other food mag sub, with our increasing awareness of the importance of nutrition in our lives.

Four years pass. Need a dessert for a lactose intolerant guest. Cheesecakes ruled out. A chocolate dessert might be the thing. A perfect opportunity to try that amazing chocolate pudding recipe. Hmmm. Where is that photocopy?

No time to excavate the entire dr bob cooking team food archives. Fortunately a few issues back, Cooking Light has a new pudding cake recipe, easily located. What? Cappuccino pudding cake? Close enough. Fortunately in the intervening four years, bob had bitten the bullet and opened up his life to coffee products. In the old days he would not touch coffee, coffee ice cream, or coffee anything. [Well, Kahlua was an exception proving that there was hope in modifying this behavioral aberration. And mocha was a backdoor entrance for coffee in some dishes that avoided direct coffee confrontation. And of course bob was an old tiramisu hand in spite of the coffee ban.] Doing the coffee initiation in Rome made it easier, since street cappuccino's are universally great there. Then Armenian coffee. Then gourmet coffee took hold in America and bob was ready. Frappucinos, mocha blasts, lots of goodies.

Bob Dole had also made talking about himself in the third person socially acceptable for other bobs. [Ran against incumbent US President Bill Clinton in 1996. Time is not kind to the losers.]

So we made a few minor changes to accomodate our guest and available resources. Stiff layer on the bottom. Coffee sloshing around on top, it was certainly the strangest cake we've ever put into the oven, but it performed its inversion trick as advertized. And the result lived up to the expectation. Appropriately described by that special superlative dessert word: decadent.

Here are both recipes and our forced modifications of the second one required by the circumstances. The nutritional serving data are for 9 servings.

 

ingredients

Mocha Pudding Cake
Cooking Light
Jan/Feb 93, p.60
[Jun 98, p.106]
Cappuccino Pudding Cake
Cooking Light
Oct 96, p.74
CPC modifications
Winter 96-97
1)
1 c all purpose flour
2/3 c sugar
1/4 c unsweetened cocoa
1 1/2 T instant coffee granules
2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt

1 c all purpose flour
2/3 c sugar
2 T unsweetened cocoa

2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
2)
1/2 c 1 percent lowfat milk
3 T vegetable oil
1 t vanilla extract

1/2 c evaporated skim milk
1 t vegetable oil
1 t vanilla extract

1 percent lactaid milk
3)
veggie cooking spray

1/4 c semisweet chocolate bits


1/4 c grated bittersweet chocolate
4)
1/3 c sugar
2 T cocoa

1 c firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/4 c unsweetened cocoa
5)
1 c boiling water

1 3/4 c hot water
2 (.77oz) envelopes instant cappuccino mix or 1/4 c other flavor

2 pumps of 1 expresso serving, plus hot water totalling 1 3/4 c
6)
1 c plus 2 T vanilla ice milk [=16+2 T]

9 T frozen vanilla yogurt
Nutrition Info
calories 221
[25% from fat]
protein 3.5g
fat 6.1g
[sat 1.7g, mono 6g, poly 2.3g]
carb 38.2g
fiber 0.4g
chol 3mg
iron 1.3mg
sodium 154mg
calcium 90mg
calories 247
[11% from fat]
protein 4.2g
fat 4.2g
[sat 1.5g, mono 0.5g, poly 0.4g]
carb 52.4g
fiber 0.3g
chol 1mg
iron 2mg
sodium 123mg
calcium 175mg

Interesting how the numbers changed with a few more years of increasing interest in healthy eating.

instructions: [mocha/cappuccino]

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Combine group 1 ingredients in a bowl and stir well.
  3. Add group 2 ingredients, stirring until smooth. [CAPPUCCINO: stir in chocolate bits or grated bittersweet chocolate.]
  4. Spoon batter into [MOCHA: 8 in square baking pan coated with veggie spray / CAPPUCCINO: 9 in square baking pan].
  5. Combine group 4 ingredients and sprinkle over batter.
  6. MOCHA: Pour boiling water over batter.
    CAPPUCCINO: Combine water and coffee mix, stirring to dissolve, and pour over batter. DO NOT STIR.
    [BOB MODIFICATION: or add elongated expresso here.]
  7. Bake [MOCHA: 30 min / CAPPUCCINO: 40 min] or until the cake springs back when lightly touched in center.
  8. Serve warm, topped with [MOCHA: 2 T ice milk / CAPPUCCINO: 1 T frozen yogurt / BOB: generous scoop of vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt or Kalua/Frangelico/Tiramisu liqueur flavored whipped cream]
    [Try serving your piece with only one or two level tablespoons of an ice cream product!]

notes

  1. It's been a long time since the days we used to occasionally make chocolate chip cookies, so there were no chips on hand for this adventure. However, since our tiramisu topping choice had just been upgrated from cocoa to grated bittersweet chocolate, some of the latter was ready to go instead. We grated what seemed like a quarter cup onto a plate, and then picked it up to dump into the batter. POOF! It exploded into the air over several feet of kitchen counter and floor. [Static electricity.] Enough fell back onto the plate and counter to carry on.
  2. For some reason, our overstocked kitchen has no square baking pan, which if 9 inch on a side divides nicely into 9 squares each 3 inches on a side. We used a round glass dish and scooped the cake glop out with a flat ice cream scoop. Hard to describe the serving size. And we naturally exceeded the recommended frozen yogurt portion. Screw the numbers! [Easy to say with a Cooking Light recipe, eh?]
  3. This recipe turned up in Cooking Light for the third time in the nineties (the fourth time if you count one of its repetitons in the best recipes of the last decade collection) with slight variations as Mocha Fudge Pudding Cake, October 1999, p.151, but shuffled the grouping of the ingredients in such a way that makes it difficult to add another column to our table. Still holding the line at nearly only 11 percent calories from fat though. Based on these publication statistics, it must be pretty good, eh?
mcwpudck.htm: 8-dec-1999 [what, ME cook? © 1984 dr bob enterprises]