Tasting as you go

I was just making chocolate pudding and hazelnut cookies. And I noticed something. 

Noticing things is an interesting aspect of cooking. I have heard that it is good to taste as you go: ingredients, mixes, etc. So you can adjust seasonings, and also so you can gather data about what things taste like at various stages. Then is something goes wrong you might be able to fix it before it is too late. 

Back to the pudding. So I was all done sieving the cooked pudding and folding in the butter and vanilla when I tasted the spatula. Wow, it was bitter. That was the moment when I realized how odd it was that the recipe didn't call for sugar. Out comes the cook book and low and behold I missed the 2/3 cup of sugar. 

This far in, all I could do was fold in the sugar and hope that there was enough residual heat that it could still mix in and not be gritty. Tasted again and this was more like I remembered. 

If I were to write a cookbook, I would demand of the publisher that ingredient lists do not span pages. This is one thing I appreciate about the GOOD EATS: The Early Years book I am working though. They have very nice page layout for the recipes. No Flipping back and forth from one page to the next.