American MidWest Chocolate Cream Pie

My parents came to stay over the bank holiday weekend which was perfect timing for my husband and I to share our news in person. We had my husband's parents over for lunch and told them all at the same time; for that reason I didn't want to be cooking anything where I would have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen!

I made enchiladas for lunch which I was able to prepare that morning then just put in the oven, and my mum and I made dessert the night before.

My husband loves all things chocolate, and doesn't particularly like many other kinds of dessert, so I simply googled chocolate desserts, and came across a website of Mid-West American desserts. My mother in law is a frequent visitor to the US and loves the South, so I thought she might enjoy a dessert from the Mid-West - particularly this one!

It's a chocolate cream pie with a chocolate crust, a custardy chocolate filling and cream on top. The recipe is here on MidWestLiving.com.

I would say this was easy to make but really I have to say it looked easy to make, as my mum did most of it! She made the crust, rolled it out and put it in the tin; you part bake it lined with foil, then remove the foil and finish baking.

The filling takes a bit more effort - you have to be careful not to boil the milk, whisk together the other ingredients and mix it with some of the milk then the rest of the milk. You need to have your chocolate and butter ready to pour the hot mixture over the top and then time it while you stir.

 

After that it's pretty simple -pour the filling into the pie crust and refrigerate overnight. To serve, top with whipped cream and a sprinkle of chocolate - I was going to grate some chocolate but forgot in all the excitement of our baby news and ended up serving this as it was!

 

I'm sharing this with the We Should Cocoa chocolate baking blog challenge hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme and with CookBlogShare hosted by Everyday Healthy Recipes.

Rhubarb And Custard Cake

This month's Food 'n' Flix selection is Babette's Feast, which was chosen by Camilla at Culinary Adventures with Camilla. It's a 1987 Danish drama with English subtitles which in itself was enough to put me off - but it won the Oscar for best foreign film and was actually very good. The film begins with two elderly Danish sisters who have a French servant/cook called Babette, which we soon realise is strange given the remote location and their frugal lives. The film then goes back to the sisters' youth to explain how this came about and how Babette came to live with them. [Spoiler alert] she is essentially a refugee and spends decades living with the sisters, her only link to France a lottery ticket that a friend in Paris buys for her every year. One day Babette wins 10,000 francs on the lottery, and the sisters expect her to return to France in style and resume her life there. Instead, Babette decides to thank the community that has taken her in and become her friend, by spending the money on a feast for everyone. She prepares several courses of an exquisite French meal, and her friends only discover later that she has spent every centime of her winnings on the food for 12 of her friends. What's more, as they are eating, one diner - the only one who is particularly well travelled, having worked as an attache in Paris - comments that several of the dishes remind him of the famous Cafe Anglais in Paris. He waxes lyrical about the food - which funnily enough cost 10,000 francs for a meal for 12. Babette has successfully made some of the Cafe Anglais's signature dishes and what do you know, the chef at the Cafe Anglais was female and disappeared at the start of the war... I almost gasped aloud when I realised where the story was going and that Babette was of course the chef at the Cafe Anglais. At the end when her friends realise she has spent all her winnings and is now poor again, Babette says: "an artist is never poor".



It really is a lovely film and food takes centre stage; from the austerity of the sisters' lives to the preparations Babette makes for her feast, where the film literally becomes more vibrant and colourful. I wanted to recreate something that Babette makes for her feast, but she doesn't make it easy! She buys a very expensive red wine and makes turtle soup (from real live turtles!), quails in puff pastry, caviar on blinis with sour cream and a decorated bundt cake for dessert.

I started by thinking about what flavours I like, and I have seen a few bloggers recently recreate favourite desserts or chocolate bars in cake form, which got me thinking. I used to love rhubarb and custard sweets, and I had a tin of rhubarb in the cupboard which I bought for another recipe and never used, so I decided to make a rhubarb and custard bundt and decorate the top with rhubarb and custard sweets.

Rhubarb and Custard Bundt - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

This makes quite a big cake - my Nordicware bundt tin is quite large and deep. As it is a bundt rather than a layer cake, there is a layer of custard baked into the middle of the cake.

For the cake:
400g butter
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
400g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
60g custard powder
50ml milk
539g tin rhubarb in light syrup

For the custard:
4 tbsp custard powder
4 tbsp caster sugar
500ml milk

To decorate:
about 100g rhubarb and custard sweets

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a bundt tin; I used PME Cake Release. First make the custard: whisk the custard powder and sugar with a little of the milk, then mix in the rest of the milk. Bring to the boil and simmer, stirring, until thickened. Leave to cool; cover the pan with clingfilm so the custard doesn't form a skin.

For the cake, cream the butter andthe sugar in a large bowl. Gradually add the eggs then fold in the flour, baking powder and the custard powder.

Gently mix in the milk, and 50ml of the syrup from the tin of rhubarb. Spoon half the cake mixture into the bundt tin.

Spoon the cooled custard on top.

Spoon the rest of the cake mixture into the tin, and spread out the rhubarb pieces on top. I had been expecting the rhubarb to sink into the cake when it was cooking, but it stayed on the top -which of course will be the bottom of the cake.

Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. Cover with foil if the top is getting too brown.

Allow to cool in the tin then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.  I love the swirled effect from my Nordicware bundt tin.

I bought some rhubarb and custard sweets, which I originally intended to crush and sprinkle over the top, but try as I might, I couldn't make so much as a dent in them! I didn't want to use my food processor in case it damaged the blades. So then I had another idea...

... melt the sweets in the microwave! This worked really well, though you do have to be very careful as the sugar reaches boiling point.

Use a teaspoon to drizzle the melted sweets over the top of the cake. The sugar cools very quickly and forms very thin strands which looks pretty and gives a crunchy texture without eating large pieces of sweets.

 Here's a side view of the finished cake so you can see the shape

And here's the view from the top

 The best thing about this cake is that it really does recreate the flavour of the sweets. You can see from this cross-section that the rhubarb is at the bottom, and there is a distinct layer of custard in the middle, which has kept its texture despite being baked in the oven, and the melted sweets give a sweet and sticky crunchy topping.

Here you can see the layer of custard a little better, running through the middle of the cake.

 I am sending this to Food 'n' Flix, hosted by Culinary Adventures with Camilla.

Floating Islands

Contestants on this year's Great British Bake Off were asked to make floating islands, a recipe I recently came across in the Macmillan Little Book of Treats. The charity cookbook features recipes from a selection of celebrities, some chefs and some TV personalities, as well as a handful of amateur food bloggers - including me!

Dolly Parton submitted a recipe called Floating Islands in the Stream (get it?) and I decided to try making it. This particular version is served in a chocolate custard. The recipe also gives instructions to make a chocolate sauce to drizzle over the top but I decided against making that due to lack of time.

To serve 6, you need:

For the chocolate custard:

4 egg yolks

150g caster sugar

pinch of salt

500ml milk

60ml double cream

125g dark chocolate, melted

2 tsp vanilla flavouring

meringue islands:

4 egg whites

170g caster sugar

Whisk the egg yolks, sugar and salt for the chocolate custard until creamy - I used my KitchenAid to do the job.

Next, stir in the milk and cream.

Cook in a saucepan over a low heat for 5-8 minutes, stirring constantly until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Stir in the melted chocolate and vanilla and put in a bowl in the fridge for half an hour.

To make the meringue, beat the egg whites until stiff then beat in the sugar. At the same time, bring a large pan of water to simmering point. I found it easiest to do this in a deep frying pan; the water doesn't need to be deep but you need a lot of surface space.

This is the tricky bit that some of the contestants in the Great British Bake Off struggled with, and I can see why! Using a large spoon, scoop up the meringue in an egg shape (or as much as you can manage) and gently slide into the simmering water. Poach the meringues for two minutes on each side then remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

Take the custard from the fridge and pour into pudding bowls - fairly large, flattish bowls are good for this. Place a couple of the islands on top so they float in the stream.

Personally I find custard quite difficult to make and today was no exception, and it is hard to get the meringue into the pan of water without them falling apart - though they did poach nicely when they were in the water!

I'm sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at Dollybakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes. They have quite a broad theme this month: "if it makes you happy", which Rachel explains can include many things, including trying something for the first time. Trying new and challenging recipes like this one definitely makes me happy!

Nanaimo Bars for Alphabakes

When we announced the letter for this month's Alphabakes as N, I knew right away what I wanted to make - Nanaimo Bars. Unfortunately at least two other people have already beaten me to it for the blog challenge, one of whom used the exact same recipe I was planning to use... but undeterred, I decided to make this for my Alphabakes entry anyway.

Nanaimo Bars originate from Canada and are popular across North America. They have three layers: a bottom biscuit layer, a middle custard layer and covered with chocolate on top. Apparently the recipe was created by a local housewife and became popular, selling particularly in the coffee shops in Nanaimo in British Colombia, hence the name.

I found that Edd Kimber, aka the Boy Who Bakes, had a recipe for these bars on his website and as I haven't made any of his recipes before, decided it would be good to try. It also looked pretty straightforward, which was a bonus!

I won't republish the entire recipe here; you can use the link above to see it on Edd's site. I found it interesting that he uses American measurements for his recipe (eg 2 cups biscuit crumbs), as he's based in the UK, but perhaps it's because this is a Canadian recipe. In any case I have a set of American measuring cups so that was no problem! Here's what I did:

Line a square baking tin with foil. Melt half a cup of butter.

Stir in a quarter cup of sugar and a third of a cup of cocoa powder. I didn't have a 1/3 cup size so just estimated.

Slowly whisk in one egg until the mixture thickens.

Take off the heat and mix in 1 tsp vanilla, 2 cups biscuit crumbs (I used Graham Cracker crumbs that I brought back from my trip to America) and 1 cup dessicated coconut. I was quite pleased the recipe called for this, as I'd had half a bag of dessicated coconut hanging around in the back of the cupboard for a while!

 

Mix well and press down into the prepared tin and refrigerate until firm.

Beat a quarter cup of butter and add 2 cups icing sugar.

Mix 2 tbsp custard powder with 3 tbsp milk and add to the mixture. Add a little more milk if the mixture is too stodgy, though as I discovered you really don't want it to be runny!

Spread over the base layer and refrigerate again until firm.

Melt 85g dark chocolate with 1 tbsp butter and spread over the top. I actually found this wasn't enough so melted some more butter and chocolate. Again, refrigerate until set.

It looks very nice when it is set....

.... but here comes the real test: slicing it into bars!

It started off OK but as you can see, the filling ended up squidging out (is that a word?). The chocolate on top had set so hard that to get a knife through I had to press down quite firmly, and that in turn made the custard layer come out of each side. I was quite annoyed as the other people who made this already for Alphabakes didn't seem to have had this problem!

Here's one that did turn out ok, you can see the three layers clearly.

 The base is perhaps a little thicker than I would have liked and to be honest I wasn't really a fan of the dessicated coconut in the biscuit layer and would have preferred to leave it out. I've since read that there are several variations on nanaimo bars for instance using peanut butter, which sounds nice! So if you are going to give this a go, my main piece of advice would be to make the custard layer thicker than you think you need - so thick in fact that it's not that easy to spread onto the biscuit layer. It probably explains why I needed more chocolate to cover the top as well, as I spread it on too thick. If I had spread it thinner, it wouldn't have been so hard to cut through with a knife and the custard might not have oozed out! Oh well, we live and we learn!

I am sending this to Alphabakes, hosted this month by Ros of the More Than Occasional Baker

I am also sending this to United Bakes in America, hosted by Cupcake Crazy Gem. Before all you Canadians get up in arms and say that just because this is popular in America it doesn't count, let me explain that the reason I am entering it is because my Graham Cracker Crumbs came from Wal-Mart in Denver, Colorado!