Chocolate monkeys

I much prefer to make a proper, old-fashioned dessert as opposed to buying some pre-prepared, half-frozen muck from the supermarket. Tonight, it was the turn of the flourless chocolate pudding.

No, you can't have the recipe.

I blogged a few weeks back about the pleasures of walking into a house that smells of baking. Well, tonight the house reeked of chocolate. An entire slab of cooking chocolate went into making puddings for 6. Monkey, who has a nose for trouble, appeared in the kitchen not long after I started melting the chocolate and butter on the stove. He hung around and watched me beating the sugar and eggs together, then the sifting in of the cocoa and flour, followed by the addition of the melted chocolate mixture and finished up with the folding in of the beaten egg whites.

Just before I started to fold in the egg whites, I popped the beaters out of the electric whisk thing and plonked them on the benchtop. Monkey went suspiciously silent at that point. When I completed my careful folding of the mixture (being very attentive to not bash all the air out of the egg whites with soft peaks), I turned around to find a grinning, chocolate covered Monkey. He had a beater in each hand and was licking them for all he was worth. There was chocolate from ear to ear.

It was of course less than 15 minutes after we had extracted him from the bath and dressed him in clean clothes. He finished off the beaters, put them in the sink, then looked at his chocolate covered hands and wiped them on his shirt...... I felt like sticking him in the sink along with the rest of the washing.

He made up for it by telling me that it was "very good", and then he marched out to demand a bit of Shrek before bed.

He was right about them being very good. Especially with proper double cream - the stuff that is just cream, not cream and gelatine.

Boy, I feel like I need to go and lie down for a while.