TWD: Chocolate and Vanilla Arborio Rice Pudding

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie is from Isabelle of Les gourmandises d’Isa. She chose for us to cook the Arborio Rice Pudding from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. I love rice pudding, so I was excited when I heard we were going to make this. This recipe is very simple. You simply parboil the rice, then simmer it with whole milk and sugar until the mixture is thick and creamy. Dorie had an option of making half the rice pudding chocolate and half of the rice pudding vanilla, which is what I did. You simply divide the mixture once it is cooked and add vanilla extract (I used vanilla bean paste) to one half, and chopped bittersweet chocolate to the other half. I topped my vanilla pudding with whipped cream and cinnamon, and my chocolate pudding with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. This pudding tasted good. It was a bit too sweet (especially the chocolate half), so I would probably cut back on the sugar a bit, but it was still tasty. The recipe in the book states that you should let the rice and milk simmer for 35 minutes, but Dorie herself posted over at Tuesdays with Dorie, and said that there was a typo, and the actual cooking time is 55 minutes. Fortunately, I caught that message in time, unfortunately, my pudding was still a bit runny. I let mine cook for a bit over an hour, and it still never thickened up the way it was supposed to. However, that didn't stop me from eating it. I think next time, I would probably cut back on the parboiling time, so that the rice releases more starch into the milk mixture to help it thicken better, similar to risotto.