With the Easter holiday over the weekend, I seized the opportunity to create a simple dessert for my family’s small gathering. My family is largely one of chocolate-lovers, so I decided to make one of the best chocolate pudding pies I ever had! Well, at least the pudding part was the best I ever had. The crust? Not so much…

Making It, Part 1

This dessert had two parts: the pie crust and the pudding filling. (Technically it’s three if you include the whipped cream topping, but for the sake of this post, I’ll include that with part two.)

The pie crust was already made. When I made the MB pie crust back in January for another recipe I had half of the dough in the freezer. However, this time I was more hopeful that the crust would turn out better than it did when I used it the first time. You can read about that recipe here.

So for this dessert, I just had to make the chocolate pudding filling. It was a pretty straight-forward pudding to make. A handful of ingredients are added to whole milk that is cooked until thickened. Once done, you add in vanilla and chocolate chips to make the flavor even stronger.

And let me tell you — this chocolate pudding was rich! I used Belgian chocolate chips I found at my local Aldi and purchased Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder. These two ingredients caused the pudding to be extra decadent.

Baking It

As I said earlier, I only had to bake the pie crust. This was actually a deviation from the recipe as written. The recipe has you make a chocolate cookie crumb crust (similar to a graham cracker crust found in cheesecakes) but since I had the extra pie dough disk, I just used that.

I started off by par-baking the crust and then fully baking the crust. The chocolate pudding mixture doesn’t actually bake. It just needs to “set” for a few hours in the fridge.

I rolled out the dough as stated in the book, transferred it to the pie plate, took the time to press it all into the pan trying not to stretch it too much. I even chilled the pie dough and plate for 15 minutes. But sadly, the pie crust still fell down a bit and lost its shape during the baking process. I think there was just so much butter in the recipe that it just couldn’t hold up the heat of the oven.

Overall, I guess it was somewhat better than the one before. But it still wasn’t great.

The pudding mixture made A LOT! I had so much left over that I had to store in a bowl. But it didn’t go to waste! It’s already gone…

Making It, Part 2

Later that day, after the pudding was chilled, I made the whipped cream topping. I decided to use powered sugar instead of regular sugar since I wanted a slightly more stable whipped cream. I whipped the cream to soft peaks, added in about five tablespoons of powered sugar and a couple teaspoons of vanilla and continued to whip until firm peaks. I then used a piping bag to decorate the pie with a nice design.

I shaved some semi-sweet chocolate on top as well to give it extra flair!

I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth in! And, honestly, I wasn’t the only one.

Tasting It

I was extremely impressed with how this pie turned out. Unfortunately, my hopes and dreams were let down a bit. While the whipped cream and chocolate pudding filling were stunning, the crust had some issues. I did, indeed, under bake the crust — by a lot, probably. Which was surprising to me since the color of the crust when it came out of the oven originally was nice and golden brown.

Because of this, I decided two things. First: only eat the filling. Second: I’m not a fan of this pie crust recipe. In the future when I am making pie crusts for recipes in the book, I probably won’t use this one. I’ll use my grandmother’s instead. It always comes out good!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing theater again. So that is taking up practically all of my free time. This week, in the midst of all the rehearsals, the lack of sleep, and scarfing down dinner in the ten minutes between arriving at the theater and when rehearsal starts, I have the desire to bake. So, on Friday, cookies!

Until then, have dessert first!