Chocolate Pie {Recipe}

We have been having a great summer holiday, the weather this year is fabulous and we have done our best to take advantage of the copious amounts of sunshine, with trips to the beach, ice creams in the park, walks in the forest, BBQs and lots of bike rides.

With all the fun and the heat, I haven't wanted to spend hours and hours in a hot kitchen, but still wanted to provide goodies for my family, so I have been trying out some quick and easy recipes. I have had a few failures, some being unworthy of photographing and sharing but still tasty, while others were less so. My greatest success however has been a chocolate pie. It was pretty good first time, and didn't take too many iterations to get it just the way I like it.

The filling for this pie is velvety smooth and wonderfully chocolatey, completely indulgent.  If you are a chocoholic, like me, then this is the pie for you. I am not a big fan of dark chocolate in large quantities, but find that milk chocolate does't tend to have quite enough depth of flavour in this type of dessert, so I compromised with a mix of milk and plain chocolate (at least 50% cocoa solids). I also opted to use ready-rolled sweet short crust pastry in favour of making my own, in keeping with the "quick and easy" theme.

Chocolate Pie Recipe

Ingredients:

1 package ready rolled sweet shortcrust pastry

285ml double cream

215ml milk

(double cream + milk should make up 500ml in total)

300g milk chocolate

200g plain chocolate (at least 50% cocoa solids)

3 large eggs

Crust

Preheat oven to 160°C 

Line a 26cm deep pie dish with ready-rolled sweet short crust pastry.  Blind bake for about 20 minutes, until the crust is just turning golden around the edges. Either weigh the crust down with greaseproof paper and baking beans, or make sure that your pastry is well chilled and jab the bottom thoroughly with a fork before baking (the base tends to balloon a bit with this method, but it drops back down once removed from the oven.

Filling

Reduce oven temperature to 140°C

Combine double cream and milk and heat until scalding (just before boiling). Meanwhile chop chocolate up into a bowl. Once scalded, pour cream mixture over chocolate and stir until all the chocolate has melted and combined (at first it looks as though the chocolate has seized or split, but just keep stirring and it will all come together). Leave to cool for a few minutes so that it doesn't cook the eggs when they are added.

Thoroughly beat the eggs then add to the chocolate mixture while stirring. Combine well.

Pour into the crust and put into the oven. The filling is very runny and it can be quite hard to get the pie dish in the oven without spilling. Placing the dish on a baking tray before pouring the filling in can make this easier.

Bake for about 40 minutes, until the filling has set but still wobbles.

Allow to cool before serving. Serve as it is, or top with chocolate curls or a dusting of cocoa.

 Enjoy :)

Three Princesses One Cake

So a friend of mine asked me to make a birthday cake for a little girl who loves Disney princesses, specifically Cinderella (her favourite), Rapunzel and Belle. I must have gone through half a dozen designs before I settled on my favourite. The trick was, I wanted to include enough detail for each princess that they could be easily identified without actually having all three as figurines on the cake.

So Cinderella got one of her little blue birds, floating pretty ribbons around her.

Pascal got to feature on behalf of Rapunzel. He is also clinging to a long rope of Rapunzel's hair, which wraps more than twice around the cake. I just love Pascal, definitely my favourite bit on this cake :)

 And representing Belle is the ruffled golden yellow dress and the red rose. 

At the party I was presented with these stunning roses (and a box of chocolates) to say thank you. They are beautiful and so fragrant, I can smell them all through my house this evening.

My Very First Lemon Meringue Pie

I made this pie as a surprise for my hubby. He has been saying for years and years that I should make him a lemon meringue pie, but he wants me to use his old recipe, which he has never been able to find. So today I decided to take a chance and use a recipe I found on the internet and make my very first lemon meringue pie, ever!

Doesn't it just look delicious? Now I have never really been a big fan of lemon meringue pie, but I have been converted! Crisp pastry beneath wonderfully tangy lemon curd, smothered in velvety smooth, soft and light meringue. It came out perfectly on my very first attempt, thanks to a wonderful recipe and brilliant explanations of the food science behind the pie by Not So Humble Pie. I highly recommend her recipe, I will certainly be making it again, very soon.

Update: A month later and I have made it twice more, and it seems to become more delicious each time!

P.S. I did the chilled filling method and didn't add any cake crumbs. I had little to no weeping, and the meringue only threatened to slide off of the slices serves the next day.

Carrot Cake and Gingerbread Cookies

I was asked to bring a carrot cake to our ward talent show, but I didn't want to make just another boring carrot cake, so I added some gingerbread cookies - decorated as carrots of course! The icing is cream cheese buttercream icing and is piped on in a method called "Pretty Petal Effect" that I learned from My Cake School. It is so easy to do, pretty quick and so effective.