The Pudding Experiment

Today my son and I made lemon and chocolate pudding - not the instant shit, but the kind you actually have to cook (which is the only kind I'll eat...I have very fond memories of my Grandmother and I cooking My-T-Fine chocolate pudding, pouring it into glass dishes and topping it with heavy whipping cream).

He and I had decided prior that we would make layered cups, where the lemon would be on the bottom and the chocolate would be on top. So our hypothesis was that the pudding would end up layered, after cooking per directions on the respective boxes, and pouring directly into cups after cooking.

So we started the lemon pudding first (and I had no idea that lemon pudding has no milk in it, but does have egg yolk and sugar in it!). Once that was cooking, we mixed up the chocolate pudding (which seemed to be at least double the amount of the lemon, as we got a big box of chocolate and a small box of lemon) and started to cook it. The lemon pudding finished cooking first, so we started pouring it into clear plastic cups (b/c we wanted to be able to see the layers)...big mistake. Duh Jodey - plastic melts at high temps. We immediately saw the problem and I got out glass dishes. We poured the lemon pudding into them (no exact measuring, but they all appeared to be around the same volume of pudding per dish. We left them alone while the chocolate pudding continued to cook.

Moving right along...the chocolate finished cooking and we poured it onto the lemon layer in each cup. What we *expected* to happen was that each cup would have 1 layer of lemon at the bottom and then a layer of chocolate at the top - NO MIXING. In actuality, and what I find pretty damn strange, is that the first cup we started pouring the chocolate into did NOT layer. Instead, it was almost like a pudding cake, where the chocolate pudding disappeared inside the lemon pudding. In my mind, this shouldn't have happened as this was the first cup of lemon to be poured, thus it had the longest amount of time to cool. Each subsequent pouring of chocolate pudding onto lemon pudding resulted in the expected layers...it was just the first one that didn't layer.

Odd...but I'm sure there's some easy explanation for it. Maybe it had a tad more lemon pudding than the others, thus needed longer to cool in order for the surface tension to be strong enough to support a layer of hot pudding on top of it.

Or...sometimes pudding is just pudding.

Whatever, chocolate and lemon are NOT good together, but separately they rock. If only we had some heavy whipping cream...