There's approximately zero chance that I'll measure out flour and baking soda, turn on my oven, and bake. It's just not my thing. But when my coworkers started buzzing about the Great British Baking Show and judge Mary Berry's stone-cold shade, I made a pact with a few friends to watch the show. To correspond with the "Pudding" episode, I thought it might be fun to make pudding, and I did what I often do: search through the Bon Appétit archives and try to find a recipe for this assuredly easy dessert.
I found a chocolate-avocado pudding that just entailed dumping a bunch of ingredients into a blender and then letting it sit in the fridge while you forget about it. Prep time would clock just under 10 minutes. It sounded excessively healthy and borderline strange (avocado?! in dessert?!). But I remembered editor at large Christine Muhlke professing her love for the recipe. I trust her and I trust Gjusta, the dreamy Los Angeles cafe that made it, so I bought the ingredients and went to work.
Essentially, you just scoop the flesh of 2 avocados into a blender with the seeds from inside a vanilla bean pod (you could use vanilla extract, I guess, but it's so easy to take the back of a spoon to the inside of a pod that I'd suggest just doing it). Then add ¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, ½ cup maple syrup, ¼ cup agave nectar, ¼ cup orange juice (the recipe says fresh but I totally used Tropicana), and ½ tsp. salt. Then, as you're blending, you open up the lid hole and pour ¾ cup not-quite-boiling hot water in. I have an electric kettle at home so it was extremely easy to conjure up hot water on command. I stuck a spoon in there for an official taste test, and it seemed thick to me at that point. So I drizzled in more orange juice (maybe it was about a tablespoon) and blended till it was all mixed in.
Then you separate it into a bunch of bowls and leave it in your fridge for two hours. The recipe says you should use ramekins, but I barely have any room for a bottle of olive oil in my apartment, so I used whatever small Tupperwares I had around. They did the trick, because, by the time we finished eating dinner, silky chocolate pudding was waiting in the fridge, ready to eat.
I whipped up some cream (but you can skip this step if you're vegan or not feeling it) and added a dollop on top of our individual bowls, and dove in with a spoon.
It was super rich and chocolatey, with no trace of avocado, and infinitely better than whatever I used to eat in the flimsy plastic cups as a kid. We licked all of our bowls clean. Then my friends went home and made another batch to keep in the fridge for their own enjoyment. And I've made it for three subsequent dinners.
Nobody would ever even know that it's healthy-ish (all those goooooood, good fats) or vegan. Because it actually tastes creamy and, uh, edible, unlike many vegan desserts. And when I was making it, I actually kept double and triple-checking the recipe to see if I missed something: It was just so simple, and so good, that I wondered why other puddings hadn't caught on. Or maybe they had, in some deep Pinterest hole, but, honestly, I was too busy making more to really think about it.