COOKING: No-Bake Chocolate Eclair Dessert

I was doing some web surfing and came across some "no-bake" recipes. My search was narrowed down when I decided to have a go at this dessert. A great frustration for us Aussie cooks is looking at American recipes, and finding the ingredients a total mystery! There seems to be a larger variety of supermarket products, and many of them we have never seen nor heard of. This means we need to improvise a lot.

There is a great blog called " The Kitchen is My Playground" and if you CLICK HERE this link should take you to the original recipe.

The problems for me were: we don't have Graham Crackers here, nor Cool Whip, and I couldn't be confident our "vanilla instant puddings" were the same as the weight quantities in the packages were different.

I also am guilty of "ditzing" with recipes anyway..... and it is rare that I don't change them about a bit.

OK - here we go:

In a dish - place a single layer of Arnott's Lattice Biscuits (packet is pictured later in this post)  and trim to fit.

In a bowl - whip 300ml cream - and as the cream begins to get thick - add two tablespoons of icing sugar. Whip to firm peaks.

In another bowl, measure 700ml of full cream milk, and sprinkle over the packet of Vanilla Instant Pudding mix.

With the electric mixer, whip for 2 mins until thickened.

Swap to a normal whisk.

Add in the whipped cream and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract. When combined, open another packet of Instant Pudding, and sprinkle over two heaped tablespoons of mix and stir in.

Put half the cream/pudding mixture over the biscuits, and smooth flat.

Place another layer of biscuits over the top. Cover these with the last half of cream/pudding mix.

Here is the packet picture I promised.

Final layer of biscuits complete. Another biscuit would have filled the gaps - maybe I shouldn't have sampled some before finishing the build. I didn't have lunch. Ooops.

Pop into the fridge.

Now for the chocolate top layer. Here is where I followed the recipe. 1 cup white sugar, 1/3 cup cocoa and 1/4 cup milk - place into medium saucepan.

 Stir together in the pan and place onto medium heat.

Bring to the boil, and boil for 1 minute stirring constantly. Remove from heat.

I transferred it to another bowl to help with cooling. Then I had to work out how many grams was "a stick" of butter (113g) so I cubed this, measured it and after a minute or so, added it.

Along with 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Mix really well. I left it to cool (about 10 mins or so) while giving the odd stir. I was worried about pouring this chocolate over the dessert if it was too warm.

Pour and smooth over the top layer of biscuits. Cover with clingwrap and pop into the fridge. Leave Overnight (the biscuits need to soften a bit).

Invite a bunch of dessert loving, greedy people over. Warm a knife and start slicing.

Stand back to avoid the direct stampede of appreciative guests flocking into kitchen to score their slices.

Big Thumbs Up (!) 

On trying to suggest ways to improve this dessert - my husband suggested less pudding/cream volume. This dessert square did "squoosh" a bit (when the fork plunged in) because of the firmish biscuit layer, as opposed to the soft cream/pudding layer. Less soft stuff might physically stabilise it a bit better - but the overall taste was AMAZING. I gave it a 9/10!!!

This would easily serve 10 or 12 people. Great buffet dish.