chocolate pudding pie popsicles

What do you do when you have leftover whipping cream and evaporated milk sitting in your fridge?

You make pudding pie, that's what!

 

 

Or at least that's what I thought would be a perfect use of those ingredients. And maybe it would have been, in a perfect (*cough*martha stewart*cough*) world, but I totally screwed it up. 

You know that moment, right? The moment you know you screwed it, but you carry on anyway? The moment I knew I screwed it was when I decided to add the pudding to the whipped cream before the pudding had completely cooled. This melted the cream and it deflated. I stirred it around a couple times, looked at my crust, then looked at the pudding, and decided to go on with it. I didn't think it would work, but I also didn't really know for sure.

Several hours later, we were tempted to cut into it and this is what we found (rather unsurprisingly):

 

 

 

Suspicions confirmed, I put the whole pie back in the fridge and dreamt about it all night long. That's what I do. I dream ideas. It makes my sleep time quite productive, I gotta say.

I dreamt about just scraping it out of the crust and into little bowls and eating it like normal pudding. Much heavier, calorie laden normal pudding, but pudding none the less. The pudding/whipping cream mixture was still delicious on its own. Definitely lick-the-bowl-clean delicious.

Then I dreamt about pudding pops -- frozen chocolate puddingsicles, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and attempt that instead of going the easy route (because I enjoy the potential for more screw-ups).

 

in case you're wondering, graham cracker crust with a light whisper of chocolate pudding is really delicious to eat on its own and is part of a healthy breakfast

I scraped the chocolate filling out of the pie crust and into a large measuring cup which I then used to pour the pudding into my popsicle mould. I only had enough to do 7 of the 8 popsicles. Shame. Someone's going to go popsicle-less one night.

 

Then I stuck my ugly retro red sticks in and put the whole lot in the freezer.

Waiting was the hardest part.

But the results were definitely worth it. These pudding pops are ah-mazing! And, as weird as it might sound, the little pie crust bits that were unintentionally mixed in with the pudding made these even more interesting and enjoyable.

Pudding pie popsicles.  What a happy accident!

If you want to recreate these:

1. Make - this pudding recipe, but substitute one cup of evaporated milk for one of the cups of milk;
2. Make - this graham cracker crust recipe. Bake and cool as instructed;
3. Sample - the pudding out of the pot with a small spoon periodically while waiting for it to cool;
4. Fidget - you've done enough baking today and want to finish with this already so start getting anxious;
5. Whip - about one cup of whipping cream;
6. Sample - the pudding out of the pot again and realize it's still warm (damn it), but you've already whipped the cream so screw it already;
7. Fold - all the warm pudding into the whipping cream and stir it around and then try to rewhip it and find that that dewhips it more and then finally give up;
8. Chill - the pudding/whipping cream mixture overnight angrily;
9. Crumble - some of the cooked graham cracker crust up into bits and mix the bits into the pudding;
10. Pour - the pudding into popsicle moulds and freeze until firm;
11. Enjoy!