French Silk Chocolate Pie

This past Sunday was Mother's Day and my sister and I decided to split the menu duties for the Mother's Day dinner for our Mom. My sister, who I've remarked before is CHEF-quality in the kitchen (while I am COOK-quality), was going to do the main dish and a vegetable. I would do a vegetable also, plus a salad, and a dessert.

For all of my interest in food and in cooking, I'm not much of a dessert guy. I enjoy eating a good chocolate mousse and I'll emotionally-eat 3/4 of a Dutch Crumb Apple Pie on occasion, sure, but for the most part I don't like sweets and don't really make them when I do a dinner.

But I volunteered to do it after a magazine randomly showed up in my mailbox called Cook's Country. I have no idea where it came from. As a gift I was given Chef's Illustrated, but this was totally different. I was paging through the magazine and found two great recipes that I wanted to try for Mother's Day. The first was a recipe for Honey-Goat Cheese Sugar Snap Peas and the second was for French Chocolate Silk Pie. Most likely it was the "food porn" style picture of the pie that drew me in. I can't resist good food porn pics. Watching too much Food Network in HD makes me want to take a shower sometimes.

The recipe seemed complicated to me, but it was worth it for my Mom. The first step was to double boil 8 oz of bittersweet chocolate. I bought some 50% cocoa bars and broke them up into chunks. I didn't buy 70% cocoa because I used that a few months ago for a recipe and it is very dark and bitter. Double boiling involve getting a saucepan of water boiling on the stove then reducing it to a strong simmer. Place the broken chocolate chunks into a metal mixing boil and set it atop the saucepan so that the bottom isn't in the boiling water. The chocolate melts by the steam heating the bowl gently. Once the chocolate is melted, take it off the stove (keep the water going) and let it cool.

Next I took 1 cup of heavy cream and whipped it with a hand mixer on medium speed for 4 minutes until the peaks were stiff and fluffy. Put that in the fridge to chill.

In a second metal mixing bowl, crack 3 eggs, add 2 tablespoons of water, and 3/4 cup of sugar and mix well for 5 minutes on medium speed. Once this is mixed, take it to the stove and double boil it until the mixture is 160 degrees (note - I don't do temps, I guesstimate with the finger test). Once it was heated up, I mixed it on medium again until fluffy for another 6-7 minutes.

Add the melted chocolate into the sugar-egg-water mix, plus 1 tablespoon of vanilla (I used extract -- my chef-like sister said I should have used pure. Ehh.) and mix for 2-3 minutes. Take the whipped cream out of the fridge and fold by hand with a spatula into the mixture until no white streaks remain.

I used a pre-baked graham cracker crust and poured the French Chocolate Silk Pie mix into this crust. Chill in the fridge for at least 3 hours. It is a rich dessert and kind of a pain to make, but it's worth it. Note -- I didn't take a picture of it...the picture above is a stock Internet photo. I didn't slather additional whipped cream over it like in the picture.