Malted & Salted Caramel Pudding

 I'll be honest, I was going through a little bit of a rough patch with this project during the past few days. I had been experimenting with altitude adjustments that would make my bakes turn out better, but it just felt like such an unpredictable task, and one that was far too exhausting. I decided to answer that question once and for all by making Claire's chocolate chip cookie recipe and halving them into two batches - one with the exact measurements, times, and temperatures in the book, and the other half with all the altitude adjustments that might work. Alas, both batches turned out terrible. The "control" batch spread and became overly browned and extremely hard. The adjusted batch was a bit softer in the middle, but the edges had also spread quite a bit and became very lacy and burnt. I think I need to understand the fact that I am making 185 recipes, most of them for the very first time, and it is a given that at least one, and probably quite a few, will not turn out great on their first attempt. The frustrating thing, though, is that the same chocolate chip cookie recipe was the very first recipe I baked in this apartment, back in September, before I even began to explore altitude adjustments, and they turned out fine. I'm not sure what happened - maybe halving the batches threw some of the proportions off, but for now I'm shelving that recipe and coming back to it when I get the courage. 

I'm also becoming a bit discouraged by just how many sweet things I'm making, and how much of it I'm inevitably going to eat. I started this project in large part due to the struggles I had with my weight and with eating, and I thought making these desserts would force me to have a better outlook on food. However, I still feel a little nervous with making these large desserts, and I'm afraid it'll just lead to more binge eating. I'm going to find ways to deal with this internal issue mentally, but I don't think stopping this project is the solution. I've invested a lot of equipment, ingredients, and time into doing this because it's a huge passion of mine, and I have a really nice kitchen this year to make all these things in. 

As part of my effort to refocus my mind a little bit after the chocolate chip cookie debacle, I shifted my direction to the first non-baked recipe I've made. Claire has several stovetop and freezer desserts in her second book, What's for Dessert, so I figured that while I recalibrate my strategy in regards to baking, I'll focus on those for a while. The Malted & Salted Caramel Pudding in that book jumped out at me from the start, so I figured I'd give it a go. Claire says in the headnote that if she had to choose one dessert flavor to eat for the rest of her life, she would choose caramel. I just might agree with that sentiment. I love caramel - it's the result of a truly magical phenomenon in which plain white sugar is coaxed just until it develops so many layers of dark, bitter, toasty, delicious flavor. In this pudding, the flavor of caramel is combined with malted milk powder, an ingredient I've never used before but that's pretty easy to find at a conventional grocery store.

I like the idea of a non-baked dessert recipe because it's easier to scale down the volume you're making. With a cake or pie, you can't really do that unless you have a smaller cake or pie pan, but since a pudding is individually portioned, you can make as much or as little of it as you like. This recipe serves eight, so I quartered it to make, in theory, two servings. I was scared to scale it down further because I figured it would increase the margin of error a little too much. 

This was the very first time I made caramel from scratch. I've heard it's a very technical process, and while I don't think it's that difficult, it does require a lot of attention. The sugar takes quite a while to turn brown, but when it does, it happens fast, and from there it's only a matter of seconds before it's on its way to burnt. After removing the caramel from the heat, you have to whisk in the heavy cream immediately, or else the caramel will harden and, well, turn more burnt. That happened to me a little - I had some hardened chunks from stopping to take videos and look at the next step of the recipe - oops! But this caramel is surprisingly forgiving. I really like that Claire gives a tip within the recipe for what to do if your caramel has hardened - you can just put it back over low heat until it dissolves. This helped a little. Point is, don't stress the caramel too much. It'll be fine.

After the caramel, the pudding is extremely easy to make. You just whisk some eggs, along with the malted milk powder, into the caramel, cook it over the stovetop for a while until thick and creamy, and chill it in the fridge for a few hours. When you're ready to serve, you whip up some cream and crush some Biscoff cookies and assemble your little pudding glasses. I got a glass for around $2 at Target specifically for the pudding/mousse desserts I'll be making, but the shape makes it a little difficult to really get in and be precise, so I kind of regret getting it. Whatever, who cares? Also, maybe I just eat more than the average person, but I feel like the servings were a little skimpy. I feel like Claire probably designed this recipe to be eaten as a very small, light sweet something at the end of a meal and made the serving sizes based on that, but I was eating this for breakfast (don't judge me) and kind of wanted a little more. Unfortunately, I had already eaten the other half of what I had made the previous night (!) so that was all I had to serve up and photograph. Lesson learned.

This pudding was extremely delicious. I'm sure you can imagine what a salted caramel pudding tastes like without me going on about it, and yes, it's just as good as you can imagine (if you like caramel, that is). I think the addition of malted milk powder adds a really nice depth of flavor that enhances the caramel really nicely (it basically tastes like the inside of a Whopper). I wish I had a little more whipped cream to go on top, but I think it added a nice contrast to the pudding - I appreciated that it was unsweetened. I also thought the crumbled Biscoff added a nice textural element. That being said, this pudding is also delicious straight from the bowl. 

I think I've always had this unconscious prejudice towards non-baked desserts as being inferior to baked ones, and I've heard Claire talk about this too a few times. However, I think I've changed my mind a little bit. I think this attitude came from my annoyance with people who say they "don't bake". I get that I'm probably more passionate about baking than the average person, but I just don't like when people close themselves off to entire things like that. That being said, I now recognize that there are some people who, for whatever reason, might not be into baking like I am, and that's okay! I actually think there are a lot of positives to puddings, mousses, and the like. As much as I love baked goods, I'm sometimes just not in the mood for something like that. I wouldn't call stovetop desserts light per se, but at the end of a really carb-y meal or just when you don't really have space for an entire piece of cake, they can be an ideal vessel for something sweet. They can feel very elegant and fancy (served in parfait glasses and gussied up) or delightfully casual (eaten out of a big bowl on the couch while watching TV). And as I said before, they're a lot easier to scale down, so if you're living alone, you can make a bowl of pudding for yourself without the commitment of having an entire cake to eat for the rest of the week. Pudding, you've won me over.

Overall Rating: 10/10

After making this recipe, I did a little more research into high-altitude baking. A lot of the "bigger" websites gave somewhat vague instructions, like "add one tablespoon more liquid! add one-two tablespoons more flour!" Okay, but is that per cup, per half-cup, or what? Obviously, if I'm just adding say, a teaspoon of vanilla, I'm not gonna be adding another tablespoon to that. It's a non-issue, I know, but in baking the slightest change in proportions can yield a different result. It almost seems as though us altitude bakers are treated as an afterthought by the sea-level people. So far, the best guide I've seen comes from a blog called Mountain Mama Cooks. She lives in Colorado, and I get the sense that she has a lot of experience making these adjustments and has actually tested her suggestions, which I don't think I can say for some of the other sites (the link to her guide is here). For now, I'm making the adjustments she suggests, but I'm not bothering with adjusting oven temperature and time - I've found that I haven't really had any problems with that.