Chocolate Coffee Pie

Most of the stuff I make is hand-held…cookies, bars, whatever. But not everything.

For this one you’ll actually need a real, honest-to-goodness pie tin (you know you have one in the back of the cabinet somewhere). It’s another layered dessert, and the layers work together perfectly. This is one to serve if you’re having people over and seriously – they are going to love it.

Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

Crust

· 1 oz. bittersweet chocolate

· ½ cup sugar

· 1 t vanilla

· 2 cups crushed graham crackers

Filling

· 2 t instant coffee grounds

· 2 cups milk, separated

· ½ t unflavored gelatin

· 3 T cornstarch

· 3 oz bittersweet chocolate

· ¼ cup dark brown sugar

· 2 t dark rum

· 1 t vanilla

Topping

· 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream

· 1 t dark brown sugar

· ½ t vanilla

· ¼ t instant coffee grounds

· 1 t dark rum

Directions

Starting with the crust, if your chocolate is in a bar of some sort, chop it until it’s finely ground and set that aside (I just put it in the mini food processor and blasted it).

Put the sugar in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring regularly, until the sugar starts to melt. Keep cooking, now stirring constantly, until the sugar is completely melted and has turned a nice golden brown. Add in the vanilla and stir until its blended in.

Take the saucepan off the heat and pour in the crushed graham crackers, stirring until they’re well combined. While everything is still warm, press the mixture into the bottom of a pie plate (8” or 9” is standard). Make sure it goes up the sides, as well as on the bottom.

Take your ground up chocolate and sprinkle it over the crust. Since the crust should still be warm, the chocolate should melt fairly quickly. Spread the melted chocolate over the crust so it’s kind of evenly spread and put the whole plate in the fridge so that everything can cool down.

For the filling, in a small bowl dissolve the instant coffee into ¼ cup of the milk. Once that’s dissolved add the gelatin, stir that until that’s dissolved and set that bowl to the side.

Put the rest of the milk (1 ¾ cups) into a small saucepan, add in the corn starch and whisk until combined. Turn the heat on to low and continue to whisk until the mixture starts to simmer and bubble a little bit around the edges. Keep simmering for another 3 minutes and then take it off the heat. FYI, since you’re going to have the heat pretty low it’ll take a while to heat up, maybe 10-15 minutes. It’s a lot of whisking but have patience, grasshopper.

After you’ve taken it off the heat add in the gelatin mixture, chocolate, brown sugar, rum and vanilla. In order to help the chocolate melt more quickly, you probably want to chop this up a bit, too.

Mix everything together until the chocolate is melted and everything is smooth, about a minute or so.

Pour everything into a glass or metal bowl and set that that bowl into a larger bowl filled with ice and water.

Whisk the filling continually while it’s cooling (you want to make sure the gelatin doesn’t completely set just yet). Get the mixture to room temperature, which should take about 5 minutes.

Take the crust out of the fridge and pour the filling over it. Cover the pie plate and put it back in the fridge to cool and set. This will take at least three hours, so I just do overnight – it’s easier.

Finally, the topping! This is pretty easy.

Put the cream, brown sugar and vanilla into a bowl and beat with your hand mixer until it’s stiff. Take the instant coffee grounds, dissolve them in the rum and fold the rum into the whipped cream with a wooden spoon, just enough to integrate it. Be gentle on this part – don’t mix it with the hand mixer.