Currently cooking out of Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

One of my favorite desserts is Cook’s Illustrated chocolate pudding cake. It’s cake, it’s pudding, it’s both! Oh, and it is just a little bit chocolatey. Served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, this dessert is heaven.

Enter Cook’s Illustrated slow cooker chocolate pudding cake. It isn’t quite as good as the original version, but during the summer when you don’t want to heat up the house, this will do, quite adequately. Especially with that scoop of vanilla ice cream melting along side of it.

Chocolate cake in a slow cooker. Who knew?

This recipe is really simple. You mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt) with the wet ingredients (milk, butter, egg yolk and vanilla) and then stir in some chocolate chips. The thick batter is spread in the bottom of the slow cooker and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and cocoa powder. Finally, boiling water is poured over the whole thing and left to cook for about 90 minutes on high.

As the cake cooks, the boiling water mixes with the sugar and cocoa powder and moves through the batter to form a pudding on the bottom. The cake cooks up dark, dense and moist. With two kinds of chocolate (cocoa powder and chocolate chips), this dessert is not for the faint of heart. It is comfort food of the highest order. And it came out of the slow cooker! This was a nice change from stews and chilis.