Tag Archives: coffee

Decadence in a Nut-Shell

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in Chocolate Pie, Icebox Pie

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Pippa and Jack’s fall vacay, part 2. From the mountains to the beaches, these two know how to enjoy their surroundings. In October, our families shared a beach house in San Diego for four days and nights characterized by sticky sand, idyllic views, toddler shenanigans, and decadent treats.

I’m choosing to harp on the word decadence to talk about the pie we enjoyed on this vacation. This dessert is nearly laughable in terms of richness, over-the-topness, and, well…yeah. Decadence. Even Ken Haedrich includes a note in his description of this pie that reads: Warning: I doubt there’s a richer recipe in this book.

The pie in question is the…Patchwork Quilt Country Inn Frozen Coffee Toffee Pie. Even the name is a mouthful. Let’s talk about the crust first. This pie gets its own particular crust: Choco-Nut Press-In Pie Crust, which Ken comments is an “unorthodox crust” that would likely work well with many of the other icebox and ice cream pies in the Pie cookbook, “especially those featuring chocolate”.

The first step in the making of this crust involves pulsing chocolate and walnuts and sugar in a food processor. I had overlooked this small detail while packing but guess what it TOTALLY worked out because my food processor has been functional but essentially broken all year. Levi did a Target run on Day 2 of our vacation that included: a new food processor.

I purchased one item for the making of this crust that I will almost certainly never have occasion to buy again: boxed pie crust mix. (!!)

Having made that snide remark: the crust really came together nicely, was easy to work with, and tasted like something special. Here it is, pressed into the largest pie plate I own. Following this, the crust was refrigerated, then baked, then refrigerated again.

In between steps of pie-making, I assisted Pippa in creating a chocolatey treat of her own. (Thanks Trader Joe’s.)

Okay, are you guys really ready to hear about the filling? The answer is no, there’s no way to prepare for the shocking stats to follow.

7 eggs.

4 sticks of butter.

2 1/2 CUPS of sugar. (I just couldn’t do it. I reduced it to 2.)

Chocolate, espresso, Kahlua, vanilla. And none of this includes the topping.

My entire Kitchen-Aid stand mixer traveled to San Diego with me for the making of this monstrosity.

The filling is refrigerated in the already cold pie shell before a topping gets added. Here I am with an expression that says, “lol now I’ve seen it all”.

The cold pie is topped with sweetened espresso whipped cream. The recipe calls for “Rich’s Whip Topping” but that’s not available in California stores from what I could deduce (and the recipe allows that it’s only available in certain parts of the country. The Patchwork Quilt Country Inn is in Indiana, so I’m thinking this is a Midwest product. But if any of you have heard of it or used it, I’d be quite curious to know.)

The fully assembled pie freezes for 2-4 hours before being ready for consumption. After your kids go to bed is the suggested correct time to dig into this pie. I for one don’t like to caffeinate my two-year-old prior to bedtime. (But I’d be dishonest to say she didn’t taste this at all…she did get a few morsels on the morning we were packing up and checking out. We were all trying to do our best by the remainder of the pie; it was a feat.) In summary: this is as delicious as you would imagine. A pie not for the everyday, but perfect for a very special treat. Thanks to Alisa for deciding that our trip to San Diego was the right occasion. 😉

I shared a large wedge with our downstairs neighbors (a small group of friends who were renting out the bottom floor of the same AirBnB house). This is exactly how that conversation went.

Me in my mask knocking on the door. Door opens.

“Hi neighbors! Uhhhh…..I made this frozen coffee toffee pie and there’s no way we’re going to eat it all, do you guys want to try some? None of you are allergic to nuts, right?”

Despite my awkwardness, they were quite pleased and happily accepted my offering.

In keeping with the Choco-Nut theme, here’s one more vacay picture. Me with my ice cream buddy for life.

What pies are you making for Thanksgiving this week? I’d love to hear. ❤

The Summer 2015 Ice Cream Pie Files: Coffee Mud Pie with an Oreo Crust

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Ice Cream Pie

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Okay, I gotta get through this ice cream business because it’s legitimately California winter now (we’ve seen the 40’s several times this week) and everyone wants to hear about pumpkins and cranberries and apples and pears.

But may I tempt you with Oreo crumbs?

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This is a pie with merely a few ingredients: Oreos in various forms (I always use Joe-Joes), Coffee Ice Cream (I love TJ’s Coffee Bean Blast). In fact, the Warm Mocha Sauce contains more ingredients than the rest of the pie (cream, instant coffee, chocolate, corn syrup, vanilla, butter).

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The Trader Joe’s commercial continues. (By the way, I don’t make a practice of keeping Hershey’s chocolate in my house. Not to get all defensive, but I had a bunch left over from when my science class kiddos build solar ovens to cook marshmallows. If you teach a child to cook a marshmallow, he’ll ask for a piece of Hershey’s chocolate and a graham cracker to go with it…isn’t that how the book goes?)

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I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it a million times. ALWAYS make your own crumb crusts (graham cracker, Oreo, cookie, whatever) because they are like SEVENTY THOUSAND TIMES MORE DELICIOUS than anything you can buy ready-made.

You can tell I don’t feel strongly about that at all.

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Making the Warm Mocha Sauce…but obviously letting it cool before pouring it straight onto Ice Cream and melting the whole shebang.

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The Inside Scoop: What you don’t see that happens in the making of this pie is that there are actually several layers and several periods of freezing. It goes like this.

  1. Oreo Crust
  2. Ice cream. Freeze.
  3. Broken Oreos. Mocha Sauce. Freeze.
  4. More Ice Cream. More Sauce. Freeze.
  5. Salivate.

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Silly Obi, chocolate is for humans.

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I made two of these pies to celebrate a very happy occasion…my cousin Alisa and her husband Mike moved to our town! We love their new home and especially love having them close by.

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Banoffee Pie?

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in No-Bake Pie

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Last week, I continued my seasonally appropriate blog posting with a pear pie I made for Christmas Eve. Today, I will be sharing some pictures from Christmas Day itself. It started out with early morning gifts and chats with Matt and Carmel, who had just arrived from Canada the night before. We were gearing up for a week and a half of incredibleness.

Here’s me loving my new Anthropologie rolling pin and pie plate from Levi. Beauty.

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These biffles unwittingly got each other whiskey stones. How adorable is that.

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After Obi unwrapped his new toy snowman, some serious bonding time ensued.

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He then absconded with the snowman to the top of the couch.

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As befitted her name, Carmel bestowed us with a trio of homemade caramel sauces.

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Later that evening, the Collisters joined the Gelineaus and Colbys to form possibly the first group of carolers Simi Valley has seen in 40 years (at least that’s what one of the neighbors told us, with teary eyes). We were largely greeted with excitement, cell phone videotaping, and wide-eyed little children, and decided that this was our new favorite Christmas activity—one that we hope to make a true tradition. Levi and I don’t have many of those yet, other than Christmas dinner Mexican-style. Tamales and tortilla soup all the way, baby.

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Now we get to the pie, which in fact stems from another Christmas tradition—maybe we have more of them than I originally thought.

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There’s a scene in Love Actually, our favorite Christmas movie, where Keira Knightley turns up with some Banoffee Pie in exchange for a wedding video filmed by her husband’s best man (aka guy who is hopelessly in love with her and secretly only filmed her throughout the entire wedding, leading to a rather awkward moment when said video is found and played.)

I’ve wanted to try Banoffee Pie since seeing this scene for the first time, even though there are jokes made on Keira’s character’s part that she has “terrible taste in pie”. I could not reconcile “terrible” with the ingredients in my cookbook’s version of this recipe…dulce de leche, bananas, cream, sugar, instant coffee. What could possibly go wrong there? The answer is, of course, nothing. Keira, you’re wrong-o.

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I followed Ken’s recipe precisely on this one and used prepared dulce de leche rather than making it from scratch. Turns out that Trader Joe’s has a very delicious jar of it, at least around the holidays. Joe never lets me down.

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*The screenshot was borrowed from this top-notch post on the same subject, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety. It includes a variant recipe for banoffee pie, history on where this pie originated, and some classic jokes about the zip-up turtleneck that features so prominently in the referred-to movie scene.