This vegan self-saucing chocolate pudding has a lovely moist, cakey, almost brownie-like, top part, with a rich velvety sauce hidden underneath. Serve it warm with ice cream, or allow it to cool into a rich and fudgy dessert.
Grease a square 20cm (10") baking dish or a skillet of roughly the same size.
Pudding:
In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, ground flax seed, sugar, and cocoa powder.
Add the melted butter, chocolate milk, and vanilla, and whisk it all together, making sure that everything is incorporated, and that there are no pockets of dry mixture.
Pour the batter into your baking dish/skillet, and spread out evenly.
Sauce:
In another bowl, mix together the remaining 200g sugar and 30g cocoa powder, and sprinkle over the top of the batter, smoothing if necessary.
Gently pour the boiling water over the top of the pudding, avoiding making pools if you can. Pouring the water over the back of a tablespoon helps to dissipate it.
Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, until the top of the pudding is light and springy.
Remove from the oven, and allow to sit for 5 minutes before serving.
Store:
Cover dish with cling film, and store at room temperature for up to a week. Not that it will be around that long.
Notes
If you want to double this recipe, use 3 tablespoon aquafaba instead of an extra tablespoon of flax seed. If tripling, use 1.5 tablespoon flax + 4.5 tablespoon AF. If quadrupling, use 2 tablespoon flax + 6 tablespoon AF. And so on. If you simply add more flax, you run the risk of it leaving a bit of an aftertaste.
A lot of people advocate only grinding flax seed as and when you need it but since I travel so much, I don't always have access to a suitable grinder, so I use pre-ground flax seed. I keep it in the 'fridge, and it's always perfect. I'm just coming to the end of my bag, which I bought eleven months ago, and it's lost none of its gloop-making properties.
Instead of non-dairy spread, you could use coconut oil (refined if you don't want a hint of coconut) but use a bit less (e.g. 30g) because otherwise your pudding will be greasy.