Mexican hot chocolate rice pudding

This is a wonderfully warm and deeply flavoured dessert, perfect for the colder evenings ahead.

Start by making the rice pudding.

Pre-heat the oven to 170c and place all the pudding ingredients, except for the chocolate, cinnamon and icing sugar, into a crock pot.

Place that in the oven with the lid on and leave it to get on with things for two hours.

The lid has to be on so that the liquid doesn’t evaporate and instead is absorbed by the arborio rice. If you don’t have a lid for your dish, put some aluminium foil on top instead.

While that is in the oven you can make the spiced brittle. It’s so easy and just requires a little watching so as not to burn the sugar.

Place the sugar and a drop of water in a pan and put it on the stove at a high heat.

TIP: Do not stir, swirl it instead, as placing anything in the pan with it will crystallise the sugar. This can happen so easily so just be careful and make sure your pan is very clean.

Then put the nuts on a tray and sprinkle over the chilli powder.

Once the sugar has melted and is bubbling watch it like a hawk until it turns into a golden caramel colour. Swirl the pan about a few times to make sure the sugar is all melted to the same temperature, then pour it over the nuts. Sprinkle some nice big flakes of sea salt on top and allow to set.

Once the two hours has passed the rice pudding is ready — it will be soft but not quite mushy. It will also be delicious at this stage, nice and vanillay, but that’s not what we want…

To make this dessert a Mexican hot chocolate add in 200g of deliciously dark chocolate.

Stir it in along with three teaspoons of ground cinnamon and 1/8–1/4 cup icing sugar, depending on how sweet you like it.

I really love this bit — the pudding transforms from normal, kinda boring baked rice pudding to a Mexican hot chocolate rice pudding and watching the perfect white take on the almost purple brown of the chocolate is mesmerising.

Now you just need to spoon it into individual dishes and top with more cinnamon and a good sifting of icing sugar.

Serve the spicy nut brittle on the side for a contrast of texture and a little more Mexican spice.

Ingredients

Rice pudding:

1 cup arborio rice . 1/4 cup sugar . 1tbsp vanilla . 1 tin coconut milk . 5 cups vegan milk . 85% chocolate . 4 tsp ground cinnamon . 1/4 cup icing sugar

Spicy brittle:

1/4 cup sugar . drop water . 1 tsp chilli powder . 50g unsalted nuts . salt flakes

Nutrition

Serves 8. This recipe is both vegan and gluten free.

• Calories: 401
• Carbohydrates: 43.5g
• Fiber: 4.2g
• Sodium: 400mg
• Protein: 6.3g
• Sugar: 18.1g
• Fat: 21.4g