Chocolate French Silk OhMyGoodness!

My fabulous brother and his family live and work in Honduras.  I don't.  As a result, our time together is too short and too infrequent.  This past weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with my brother for a little more than a day - unexpected and very treasured time with him.  Of course, I simply had to make sure he got a slab of French Silk Pie crammed into his visit since it's one of his favorite things. 

Before I launched into an epic French Silk Pie making event though, the wisdom of my age suggested I make sure that's the way he wanted me to spend my time during his visit.  The discussion went something like this...

Me: I was thinking of making a French Silk Pie while ..
Him: OH-KAY!

Okay.

So I went hunting for a real French Silk Pie recipe.  Having never made one before, and having enjoyed some good ones and many mediocre ones, I was convinced that this would be a complex and time consuming cooking challenge.

Um.

NOT.

If you're a freak about eating anything with raw eggs in it, I suggest Cook's Country version with a cooked custard.  Yes, you will need a subscription to get to the recipe with that link.  I haven't tried it, but I'm offering it as an option because I've never made a recipe from the Cook's family that didn't rock.

I used a recipe I found just googling and contemplating the recipes.  This one is from Suite101 and can be found here.  For your convenience, it's duplicated below:

The Proportions Part One

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

3 one ounce squares unsweetened baking chocolate, melted

2 tsp pure vanilla

3 large eggs

The Method Part One

Melt chocolate in a small bowl over hot water. Do not let the chocolate harden up.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter at medium to high speed about 1 minute.

Add sugar, 1/4 cup at a time and continue to beat until light and fluffy. This will take 3-5 minutes. Scrape bowl often. It must be mixed long enough so it is no longer gritty.

Slowly add the melted chocolate to the butter mixture, beating on low to medium speed until the chocolate is well blended and mixture is smooth and creamy. Scrape again.

On medium speed, add eggs one at a time, beating after each one before adding the next egg.  Scrape bowl.
Add vanilla and give it one more mix.

Spread into prepared pie crust. 

Set aside.

The Proportions Part Two

1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla
Chocolate curls, optional for garnish

The Method Part Two
In large mixing bowl, beat cream until it sets up. There is no way to explain how long this will take. Every mixer is different. It should be light and fluffy and look like soft whipped cream. Do NOT let it get to the butter stage which can happen very quickly. If in doubt, under mix. You can always whip it a little more after the sugar is added.

Add powdered sugar and and vanilla and beat until fluffy and stiff. Do not over beat.

Put whipped cream into a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip and decorate the pie. Or pile the cream on high with a spatula.

Sprinkle with chocolate curls.
Refrigerate pie and any leftovers.

The Tips

The recipe itself includes some good tips, especially when it comes to getting the filling smooth and not turning your whipped cream into butter.

I would add that use of superfine sugar instead of regular sugar will contribute to a smoother filling.  However, I used regular sugar and beat the living daylights out of it and finally gave up on the gritty ever going away.  By the time I added the melted chocolate and the eggs, the filling was smooth as ... well ... silk.  In retrospect, I might not have had to mix the butter/sugar combo as long as I did but hey, that's one place where it's more than okay to overmix.  Air is good.

A word about mixers.  If you have a weeny, underpowered hand mixer this pie might take a while to achieve that cloud-like, perfectly smooth, chocolately goodness.  If you have a good stand mixer, it will be easier.  If, like me, you are blessed with owning a KitchenAid Professional 600 series mixer then this pie is as easy as falling off a log and will pretty much make itself in a matter of minutes.

About the crust... every recipe I've looked at tells you to put this in a regular pre-baked pie crust.  Why?  Why oh why oh why?  Doesn't this just scream out for a chocolate cookie crust?  (The answer is, "Yes, Marie, it does. Why didn't the rest of the cooking world realize this sooner?  Thank you for saving us from this culinary tragedy.") 

So, I made my first Chocolate French Silk Pie using a chocolate wafer crust.

The Proportions

32 chocolate wafers (e.g., Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers)
3 tbsp butter

The Method

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Crush chocolate wafers.

Melt butter and blend with the crushed wafers.

Press into pie pan.

Bake for 6-8 minutes.

Cool.

A Few More Tips

A food processor makes crushing the chocolate wafers a snap.  You can also just keep the processor running and drizzle the melted butter into it.  You will end up with something that looks like wet coffee grounds and makes the most delicious chocolate crust.

The bottom of a measuring cup is a perfect tool for pressing crumb crusts into a pie pan.

You don't have to use exactly 32 wafers.  I think I used 35.  Or maybe 30.  I don't know ... I ate some along the way.

Hush, puppy!

There are few things that make me as happy as a really good hushpuppy.  Frankly, anything involving perfectly fried, salty carbohydrates has my immediate attention.  Recently, I put out a call on my FaceBook page for a good recipe and my Aunt Betty (my Dad's sister from my epic cooking Mississippi side of the family) obliged with the following:

2 c cornmeal, 1/3 c flour, 2 tables sugar, chopped onion, enough b milk to make it stick together, fry in hot grease. When they ready they should turn over in the pan. Now does that sound like mamaw's recipe?

She then later specified that it's self-rising flour and self-rising cornmeal, both of which I have in my pantry thanks not to my South East Asian upbringing, but to my deep south roots.  And I have the say, this is a delightfully detailed recipe for one that came out of my Mamaw's kitchen.  I remember digging through scraps of paper and torn envelopes covered in scribbles that, if I concentrated really hard, might look like a list of ingredients (as long as you could do without measurements or complete words).

The Proportions

2 Cups self-rising yellow corn meal mix (no, people, not a box of Jiffy!)
1/2 Cup self-rising flour 

2 Tbs sugar

about 1/2 Cup grated onion
about 1 finely minced jalapeno pepper
enough buttermilk (more about this later) 

The Method

Heat enough oil in a heavy pot (or use a deep fryer) until it reaches 350 degrees.

Mix first three ingredients together in a large bowl. 

Stir in grated onion and minced jalapeno pepper.   

Add enough buttermilk to make a sticky batter type dough. 

Scoop dough out with a spoon and drop into hot oil.

Fry until hushpuppies roll over.

Drain immediately on oil absorbant paper.

The Rules

"Fried food isn't bad.  Bad fried food is bad."  - Emeril Lagasse

Thou shalt have, and hold, thy oil at the right temperture: Start it at a little above 350 degrees so that, as you quickly drop in your blobs of goodness, the temp stays in the 350 vicinity.

Thou shalt use enough oil:  I use a cast iron dutch oven filled with about four inches of oil (I used a combo of vegetable and corn oil for this batch).  You want enough oil for the hushpuppies to float and bob around freely, cooking evenly.  This also gives you the magic "I'm done" moment when the hushpuppy turns itself over in the oil.  Flip - out it comes!  Enough oil also helps the oil maintain its temperature.

Thou shalt not crowd thy cooking vessel: Want your oil temperature to plummet, and your crispy-crunchy-moist-on-the-inside miracle to turn into a soggy mess?  Then please, cram as many as you can in at a time.  I generally try to leave at least as much free oil as I have frying items.  If that makes sense.

As with all self-rising buttermilk type items like biscuits and pancakes... thou shalt not overstir.  Unless you like hushpuppies that behave like mini tennis balls.  And you don't.

The Tips

Grated onion and minced jalapenos are not the only things you can add.  At that point you could add anything else you think is yummy in a hushpuppy - like crumbled bacon, or diced cooked shrimp, or ... I don't know ... white truffles or anchovies or whatever.  Me, I like onion and jalapeno.  Period.  Thanks.

And a word about grated onion ... it does wonders for flavoring something like a hushpuppy because the grating releases much more onion juice (ergo flavor) than chopping or mincing does.  Scrape all that soggy goodness into the dry ingredients and mix it up.

What is "enough buttermilk?"  Okay, I apologize for not having a measurement here but I really don't know.  Even when I make the same thing over and over, "enough buttermilk" changes depending on the dry ingredients, the buttermilk, and whether Jupiter is aligned with Mars.  You want it to hold together well in a moist blob that you can scoop and shape easily with a spoon, not runny but not be so dry that you have to roll the batter in your hand to get it to stick together.  Think drop biscuits if that helps.

I promise the next time I make these (and there are going to be so many next times!) I will measure the buttermilk to give you at least a ball park idea. 



The Adventure Continues

On July 28, 2009 I shared the following note on FaceBook - New Adventures: Background for The Curious in which I explained why I was leaving corporate work and what I intended to pursue instead: teaching.

It has been a fascinating almost two years. 

I have learned a lot about myself, my family, my camera settings, my local libraries, farmers markets and schools.  A lot of my time has been spent working as Gabriel's champion in a world and an educational system that isn't designed with him in mind.  At all.  Ever.  I painted our house in Texas, and cleaned and dealt with competing flooring bids and learned that caulk is my friend, not my foe.  I packed and pitched and sold and consolidated all of us (more or less) into a much smaller apartment in Tulsa and rented out our house in Texas.  I cooked a lot.  I fell in love with Tulsa.

I worked on my teaching certification.  I fell into working as a visual impairment coach for a second grade girl and discovered a wonderful world with her.  I watched the country decide, state by state, that the miserable few dollars they allot to education was too much and saw thousands of educators laid off as a result.

I watched our financial reserves dwindle down to ... hey ... wait, I just found a quarter!

So I started looking for work where I knew I could have the most success - back in pure HR.  And I applied for this and for that and wasn't very excited about any of it, except that it beat living off of the change in the couch.  And I interviewed and I didn't like them and they didn't like me and on and on it went.  I said, "Hey, Universe.  I need to do something here so ... I'm just going to keep trucking and you figure out where it is I'm supposed to go."

And then it happened.  After months of applications that took companies weeks if not months to respond to (if they responded at all), I saw a job that was too perfect for me.  If you took my resume and wrote a job description, you would have ended up with this job.  And with a good company.  In Tulsa.  I applied and prepared to be ignored or wait weeks but before I had even had time to move on to the next application, I got a call.  And an interview - immediately. 

Then the next day another call, and a scheduled interview on the phone.  Then, in rapid succession two more phone interviews and an invitation to go to headquarters in the Denver area for final interviews.  My scheduled five interviews that day turned into seven during the course of the day as the Global Head of HR and one of the legal team were added to the schedule.  And one business day later ... a job offer that literally left me breathless.  Oh wait, I found enough breath to say "Yes, please!"  And the best part is - they are at least as excited as I am, perhaps more so.

So it goes, so it goes.  I started my new job today.  I am impressed with the company, with my manager, my team, my senior leader.  The location is good, the job is interesting, the resources are excellent.  For now, I'm back in corporate America and hopefully in a place and a time where it makes sense.