No-Cook Vegan Chocolate Pudding

I've recently taken up cooking and, surprisingly, I don't hate it. In fact, it involves many of my existing favorite pastimes: looking at the internet, buying things, measuring things, punching things, setting things on fire. And, at the end of all that, you get to put things in your mouth. Fantastic.As I level up my cooking skill, I find myself testing the limits of what I'm prepared to eat, which, if you know me at all, is generally restricted to foods of  the "animal" and "closely associated with animals" varieties. Needless to say, when I decided I was going to try my hand at some vegan chocolate pudding I suffered a pretty substantial existential crisis. Who am I? What have I become? What is the nature of the universe? Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?Thankfully, almost any question can be answered with chocolate.Here's a recipe forvegan chocolate pudding. You'll need:

• 2 avocados

• 1 cup of chocolate almond milk

• 3/4 cup cocoa powder

• 3/4 cup maple syrup

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

• a pinch of sea salt

• a sprinkling of cocoa nibs, if you've got them. (I just happened to have received some for my birthday. Thanks, Melissa!)

Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. The mixture will be thick (it's pudding), so you may have to whip out a spatula and stir things up a bit manually. Makes about a dozen 1/4-cup servings, depending upon the size of your avocados. Mine lasted about a week in the fridge with no discernible change in flavor before it was consumed entirely. Your mileage may vary.I've also found that the 1/4-cup serving size fits perfectly into those little mason jars you can buy at the hardware store, as pictured above. So fancy.If you end up making a batch, please let me know how it turns out. I did a taste test at work and the majority of people enjoyed it and didn't notice the avocado flavor at all.