Thar She Blows!

Boy, the chocolate pies really spouted! That’s one strike against this recipe, it calls for entirely too much filling, and once it liquifies it squirts right out the vent holes during baking. I’d say each pie lost at least a third of its filling, some over half. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since as I said, there was entirely too much to begin with. But it’s wasteful. The one pie I intentionally under-loaded (with a mere tablespoon of filling) was the only one that didn’t vent its chocolate goo. You could almost certainly get away with cutting the chocolate filling quantity in half. There’ll still be plenty of chocolate flavor in the pies, since the filling ends up coating every last corner of the interior. It starts as a grainy brown paste, but once it heats, it cooks up into a sticky chocolate caramel. Very sweet and chocolate-y, albeit in an old school Hershey’s syrup sorta way.

As far as the pastry went, it was flakier than I was expecting. Very nice and light, yet my sense is that this crust will come off better wrapped around a savory filling. Sweet fillings just seem to beg for a more standard pie crust. I’m looking forward to trying the curried mango filling in a couple of months, though I think a leftover beef stew filling is what’ll really make this crust shine.