Chocolates may be the easy route for Valentine’s Day, but there’s still time to pull off a quick homemade chocolate dessert. It’s pudding, but with a sophisticated twist from the Middle East.

Cooks there frequently pair sweet ingredients with contrasting flavors.

Nuts and seeds are common choices, and we were drawn to their common use of the sesame seed paste tahini. In the U.S., tahini most often is used in hummus, but its nutty, buttery flavor both complements and offsets chocolate and balances its sweetness.

We applied that lesson in this stovetop preparation in our book “Milk Street Tuesday Nights,” which limits recipes to 45 minutes or less. For a creamy, luxurious texture, we use half-and-half as the base, enrich it with egg yolks and thicken it with cornstarch.

We found the most complex chocolate flavor uses a combination of Dutch-processed cocoa and semisweet chocolate.

Whisking in a couple tablespoons each of butter and tahini at the end gives the pudding a lustrous sheen and nutty sesame notes. An easy whipped cream laced with more tahini balances the sweetness in the pudding.

Be sure to stir the tahini well. The oil in tahini separates and must be mixed in before use, or the topping will have a unappealing consistency.