Chocolate and Coffee: Mocha Black Bottom Pie

I love chocolate by itself, but I also appreciate it in combination with certain flavors and ingredients. Chocolate and peanut butter is always hard to resist, as well as chocolate/raspberry, chocolate/caramel, and chocolate cherry. But perhaps my all time favorite chocolate combination is chocolate and coffee. So I was curious and excited when I saw a recipe for "Mocha Black Bottom Pie" in the First Prize Pies cookbook, by Allison Kave. I knew that this was a recipe that I had to try!

This pie has several steps so that it is a pie that takes a little time to prepare. The "black bottom" is a chocolate cookie crust. When I saw this, I assumed that I would use store bought chocolate cookies, crumbled and blended with butter. But Ms. Kave insists that the cookies should be made from scratch, then blended and baked. The dark chocolate cookies have cocoa, flour and maple syrup, along with the usual egg, vanilla extract, baking soda, salt, flour, butter, and dark brown sugar. The cookies are very tasty, and could certainly be eaten as a dessert by themselves. Then comes the filling. There is a chocolate custard filling that goes over the cookie crust, and is made of unsweetened chocolate, egg yolks, cornstarch, milk, salt, and vanilla. The next layer is a coffee custard made of espresso, sugar, gelatin, and egg whites. The third and final later is freshly whipped cream topped with grated bittersweet chocolate!

This pie is beautiful to look at - it may be the best looking of all of the pies that I have made. I expected that this pie would be perfection, because of the combining of my favorite flavors. It is very good, although I was disappointed with the texture of the coffee layer. I have concluded that I either under-beat the egg whites, or let the gelatin set up a little too long. The pie was difficult to slice because the layer was not as firm as I thought that it would be. But the chocolate/coffee combination was very tasty and satisfying. As is often the case when a pie is not quite as delicious as I had hoped for, I still looked forward to eating a slice every morning! And today, I just ate it directly from the pie plate so that I would not have to worry about slicing it!

On a somewhat different topic, I wanted to mention pie making utensils. I have upgraded some of my tools since becoming serious about pie making, including my pastry blender, bench scraper (given to me by a friend), and large, flat mixing bowl. But sometimes the old tried and true tools work well also. Although I have a stand mixer, I still use my hand held mixer as well. I realized that I have owned this little mixer for 42 years, and have never had a problem with it! It was actually a wedding present at my first marriage back in the 70's - a very "seventies" type wedding gift (before everyone had gift registries)!  I appreciate all of the work that my little mixer has done through the years, and don't see any evidence that it will stop anytime soon!