Chocolate Chia Pudding

This delicious healthy chocolate chia pudding, topped with a hazelnut fudge sauce hits that sweet, chocolatey spot I crave and is low in carbs.

I like this dessert as it reminds me of my school days eating tapioca pudding from the school canteen, of which I have many fond memories.

This chia pudding is so good and super healthy, full of omega 3’s, eating just 25 grams of chia seeds a day provides 18 per cent of your daily calcium, 27 per cent of your phosphorus and 30 per cent of your manganese.  

If you decide to give this recipe a try, let me know! Leave a comment below and rate it – it’s really helpful to me and other readers knowing what you think! And don’t forget to take a picture and tag me @thegourmetlarder or hashtag it #thegourmetlarder on Instagram or Facebook. I love seeing what you’ve been baking! 🙂

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RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS

• EASE: super easy, no-bake dessert.
• GREAT FOR: after any meal, breakfast picnics.
• TASTE 7 TEXTURE: creamy chocolatey and slightly sweet from the nutty fudge sauce.
• QUANTITY: 6 portions
• TIME: 2 hours 15 minutes

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INGREDIENTS

For this recipe all you need are these ingredients:

• Chia seeds – absorb liquids, swelling up and becoming soft to form our base of the pudding.

• Dark chocolate (vegan) – adds a rich creamy texture to the pudding.

• Chocolate: There are now quite a few brands making vegan chocolate to choose from, such as these bars – Lindt classic milk chocolate, Ombar 55% coco mylk, Ombar 72% dark chocolate, Happi plain oat milk, Happi white chocolate, Montezuma’s Fitzroy 74% dark cocoa.

• Cocoa powder – adds more intense rich chocolate taste to the pudding.

Cocoa recommendations: Dr. Oetker fine dark cocoa powder or not as dark – Sevenhills wholefoods organic cacao powder

• Almond milk – or any alternative dairy-free milk works great or for non-vegans you can use milk.

• Medjool dates – Add the creamy fudge texture to our sauce.

• Whole peeled hazelnuts or hazelnut butter – adds that hazelnut hint to the fudge making it even more impressive and tasty. If you can’t get hazelnuts try any other nuts of nut butter.

TIP: I highly recommend adding a good pinch of salt to your desserts. Salt helps balance out the sweetness and richness. It also elevates the other ingredients, bring out the best characteristics of any recipe. In a seemingly absurd or contradictory way, salt intensifies the mouths ability to taste sweetness. It is the sodium that sends signals to move glucose into the sweet taste receptor cells in our tongue. The result is that salt not only alerts our ‘salt sensitivity’, but also our ‘sweet sensitive’ taste buds. I recommend Maldon Sea salt flakes or Cornish sea salt.

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WHAT VARIATIONS CAN I MAKE?

Here are a few recipe tweaks and flavour ideas:

• Nuts: Try alternative nuts like peanuts, almonds or cashews. Replace the hazelnuts with exactly the same weight.

• Texture: If you don’t like the tapioca style texture of chia seeds you can make it smooth by putting it in the blender.

• Sweetness: If you like your desserts extra sweet you can add 1 tbsp of maple syrup, honey, agave syrup, granulated sugar or another sweetener of choice.    

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NUTRITION

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STORAGE

This easy vegan chia pudding keeps well in the fridge for up to 5 days. Store any leftovers in an airtight container.

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TOOLS YOU’LL NEED

Here is a list of some kitchen equipment that I use and recommend for this recipe.

• Magimix 4200XL Compact Food Processor & Blender, 3 Bowls, 3L Capacity, Multifunctional 6 in 1

This is a really good food processor, I have used Maggie mix before, I think they are one of the best processes on the market. The blades are very sharp and I use it for breaking down biscuits, nuts and getting very smooth creams or dips. It does a really good job and its very quiet not as noisy some other brands. I recommend it to anybody who enjoys baking and cooking. They are a little on the expensive side but you pay for what you get.

• Braun MultiQuick 5 Immersion blender Black 1000 W

This is one machine that I use almost everyday. I find its multifunctional abilities very useful. I can use it to mix batters or cream liquids together and because its small I can use it to ground nuts and make fruit puree.

• Milk Saucepan, 1 Litre With Double Sided Pouring Lips

This small pan is a great size for boiling small amounts of liquids and it has pouring lips built into the rim of the saucepan which makes it easy to use.

Please check out my Shop for a curated collection of some of my favourite baking equipment. The Gourmet Larder is an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

TIP: I highly recommend using metric measurements and a digital kitchen scale, rather than cup measurements. If you have ever ended up with dry, dense or crumbly baked goods, it might be because of inaccurate volume measurements, not all measuring cups are made equally. All my recipes on this blog are carefully developed so that you can easily recreate them in your own kitchen with success, using metric measurements. It is also a lot easier, less messy and you will get far better, consistent results. 🙂
If you are interested in understanding conversions, here you will find the best conversion chart.

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