Chocolate Pudding Cake Recipe • The Prairie Homestead (2024)

This chocolate pudding cake recipe has been a stand-by in my kitchen for nearly 15 years.

Mostly because it was the only dessert I knew how to make back in my “Jill hates cooking” days.

(If you had told me back then that I’d write a cookbook, I would have firmly said you were ridiculous and insane…)

But I digress.

This chocolate pudding cake is rustic, sturdy, and no-nonsense. And I haven’t shared it with you before mostly because it’s just not beautiful... aka, it doesn’t photograph well.

But we can’t hold that against it, can we?

The #1 compliment I get on my cookbook is that it contains “normal, everyday ingredients”, and this pudding cake recipe absolutely fits that bill.

It’s a “pantry recipe”– which means you can pretty much make it at any old time, no special ingredients or trip to the store required. And, it’s easy enough that a free-range four-year old can help you make it, as you will see illustrated in the photos.

Those four-year olds in the kitchen, man… it can be stressful. Thankfully, this recipe is REALLY hard to mess up.

**Before you make this recipe, be sure to read through the whole thing. There will be a part of the process where you freak out and say “Jill lied to me and this is a disaster!!” and I want you to be prepared for that moment.**

Chocolate Pudding Cake Recipe

Yield: One 9×9-inch cake

Ingredients:

Batter Mixture:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 3/4 cup unrefined whole cane sugar (see notes)
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

Pudding Mixture:

• 1 cup unrefined whole cane sugar (see notes)
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1 3/4 cups hot water

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine all of the batter ingredients and spread them into a 9×9-inch baking dish. (And 8×8-inch will work in a pinch, too.)

Mix 1 cup of unrefined whole cane sugar and the 1/4 cup of cocoa powder in a small bowl. Sprinkle this mixture over the top of the batter mixture. (It will seem like there’s WAY TOO MUCH. Just roll with it.)

Now comes the crazy part:

Pour 1 3/4 cups of hot water (doesn’t have to be boiling– hot tap water is fine) over the entire thing.

It will resemble a chocolate swamp. And that’s OK. We’re going for the full-on swamp vibe here.

Fight the urge to mix it together.

Just avoid looking at it and put it in the oven.

Bake for 45 minutes or until the top of the cake is firm, and well, “cake-like.”

The cake will be a gooey mixture of cake and chocolate pudding which somehow materialized from the cocoa/water soup while it was in the oven. It’s magic, I tell ya.

Serve immediately while warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, or a drizzle of heavy cream.

Chocolate Pudding Cake Notes:

• I use sucanat (a whole cane sugar with a molasses flavor) for almost all of my baking. If you don’t have it, just use regular brown sugar in this recipe.
• This recipe can easily be doubled to fit a 9×13 pan.
• I have experimented making this recipe gluten-free and dairy-free and it worked well. I simply used a gluten-free all-purpose flour in place of the regular flour and coconut milk instead of cow milk.
• I’ve also heard this recipe called “chocolate cobbler”, but we’ve always just called it that “goopy pudding cake thing”

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