Sunday, November 22, 2009

Frozen Vanilla Cream Pie (Serves 8)

















Last weekend, our friends had come over from Long Island for lunch. We had prepared traditional South Indian dishes for the occasion with rice, sambar, potatoes, beans and fried chips. When it came down to dessert, since the triple chocolate cream pie that I had made a few weeks turned out so well, and time was a factor I thought of making another pie since I had the crust handy.

I did want it to be different from the last time though. So I came up with the idea of a simple vanilla pie with chocolate biscuits and chocolate chips, with a hint of mint flavor in it. Here is the recipe.

2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
15 fresh mint leaves
8 chocolate biscuits crumbled (without the cream filling)
1/2 cup Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips minced fine
Keebler Ready Crust pie crust (Graham Cracker)

Chop the mint leaves into small pieces. In a sauce pan, pour 2 cups of heavy cream and add the mint leaves and sugar. Bring the cream to a boil and stir it to dissolve the sugar. Pour the cream into a large bowl through a strainer in order to strain the mint leaves. With your hands squeeze out any juice left in the mint leaves into the cream. Add 2 tbsp of pure vanilla extract and mix. Set aside the bowl in the freezer to cool down.

I had a packet of Indian chocolate biscuit sandwiches with chocolate cream filling called Bourbon biscuits that my daughter and I love. You can buy this from any Indian grocery store or you can use any substitute chocolate biscuit that you like. Take 4 biscuit sandwiches (8 biscuits without the cream filling) and crumble them into small pieces. Set aside. Take enough Ghirardelli (or any other good brand) bittersweet chocolate chips and chop them into very fine pieces. Measure 1/2 cup of this and set aside.

After around 1 hour or so, when the cream has cooled down enough, add the biscuits and the chocolate chips to the cream and stir once or twice till everything mixes well. Pour the mix into the pie crust and freeze this for at least 5.5 - 6 hours. Garnish with mint and serve cold.

This pie turned out to be really good. Next stop is Thanksgiving :-)

Health Rating: Low

Substitute Ingredient/s: My friend's son said he would have preferred semi sweet chocolate chips instead of the bittersweet as he didn't like the bitterness. You can add any kind of chocolate chips you want in this. For the biscuits Oreo cookies can be used as well but that's too common. You can add nuts as well. I avoided them as there were kids in the audience. I think Keebler Chocolate Pie Crust might work better instead of the Graham Cracker version, although the Graham cracker was good enough.

One thing I would mention is that when I served this dessert, I had frozen it for around 4 hours only. So the vanilla pie was soft and hence the chocolate chips and the pie crust were interfering with the smooth texture of the vanilla pie. Since we are freezing only heavy cream here, there is no binding agent and hence it is advisable to freeze the pie for close to 6 hours so that the pie feels whole when you eat it.