Chocolate Pudding Pie
The dear man, my beloved First Reader, has been asking for a chocolate pie for some time. In my quest to not get fat too quickly, as fun as getting fat is, I'd been putting it off until we'd recovered from the last dessert. He finally came up with the perfect need for pie: he's having a potluck holiday lunch at work and he'd really like to show off my piecrust. With chocolate pudding in it.
Well, how could I turn that down?
Chopped baking chocolate. Looks good enough to eat!
He had a further request. Usually we do a chocolate pie with a cook-and-serve pudding, or the kind of pudding that needs cocoa powder. But he remembers his grandmother making a pie when he was a boy and using baker's chocolate in it. I don't usually keep that in the house (although I don't know why. I should. Oh, wait, trying not to get fat...) so I bought some.
Then I went looking for recipes. There are a ton of them online. This one made me laugh, so I used it, with my usual variations. I think by now you all know I can't straight follow a recipe to save my life? Yeah...
baked shells and a pot of pudding
I started out creating tart shells in silicone muffin tins and a shallow pie shell in a disposable pie tin (so he doesn't have to worry about bringing it home from work) by making a batch of my lard pie crust. One batch just did it, if I wanted bigger tart shells I'd need to do two. Or if I wanted a deeper auxiliary pie.
The first part of making the pudding went according to the recipe, but when I'd bought the chocolate I had for some reason picked up a package (4 oz) of bittersweet and a package of unsweetened chocolate. So for my version you'll want 4 oz of bittersweet (and no, chocolate chips aren't quite the same) and 2-3 oz of the unsweetened.
Look at the color of that stuff! It's like liquid fudge.
I also reserved the egg whites when I got the yolks for the pudding. Those I whipped up into meringue with about 1/4 cup sugar (I've never used cream of tartar for my meringue, but if you like it that way, by all means...).
I spooned pudding into the tart shells, then filled the pie shell, then still had enough left to put in a bowl for the First Reader. I took him the whisk and asked him to tell me what he thought of the recipe. He tasted, tasted some more, and nodded. I went back to the kitchen. A couple of minutes later he came in, and asked me if I'd tasted the pudding. "No, I wanted your opinion. It smells good, though."
The First Reader has found his gustatory bliss.
Taste it, he said, getting a spoon and handing it to me.
I obeyed, and realized what he was talking about. This is like eating fudge. It is the best chocolate pudding I've made, all others are pallid in appearance and taste beside it. It's not difficult, and mmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
One of the finished tarts, with a little Gnome hat of meringue.