Reviewed on Nov. 27, 2011 by kristinscotth
This pie was very good! I have four little boys who are very picky eaters, but a chocolate pie is always a safe bet, and they loved it. I had two problems with this recipe. The first was with the crust. I usually use my standard crust recipe any time I make a pie, but I was interested in seeing how the addition of white vinegar would be in a crust, so I wanted to try it. I don't know if it had anything to do with the vinegar, or if I should've cleaned off my pastry board better and re-sprayed and re-floured it (since I had already rolled out a crust for a different pie), but when I was rolling the crust over my rolling pin (to transfer it to the pie dish), it was tearing all over the place, and I've made lots of pie crusts, so I'm not a beginner at this. I decided to just toss it, and make a different crust instead. The second problem I had was during the truffle-making process. The recipe said to melt 1 cup of the dark chocolate chips, and then to "gradually stir in cream until blended." My gut told me NOT to do it this way, because I knew adding a cold liquid to chocolate would make it seize up, but I always like following recipes to a T, and I thought maybe adding it gradually would not make it seize up. It did. I saved it by warming it up a little in the microwave and stirring until smooth. However, for next time, I will either bring the cream to a boil and pour that over the chips and stir until smooth OR just put the chips and cream together in the microwave. I would not recommend following the recipe in this instance. Also for the truffles, I would recommend sticking a toothpick in each ball before dipping. It makes dipping them in the chocolate easier. Hold onto the toothpick, dip the ball in chocolate, immediately dip it into the salt/sugar mixture, and then stick the toothpick in a piece of styrofoam. This helps the truffle to not have a flat bottom or having chocolate pooling at the bottom. It does have a small hole, once you pull out the toothpick, but I think that's better than a flat bottom... if you care about having a nice round truffle anyway. The whipped chocolate layer had a mousse-like texture, in case you're curious to know what that was like. I stabilized my whipped cream as well before spreading it onto the pie, which I always like doing. I loved the addition of the crushed up pretzels to garnish with. The whole texture of the pie is soft, so a contrasting crunchiness was really nice. One of my sisters suggested dipping pretzels in chocolate and garnishing with those, which I thought was a good idea for next time. I thought the truffles were good, and loved the sweet and saltiness of it, but I was disappointed that the pretzels didn't stay crunchy inside the truffle. I would've liked a crunchy texture inside to have some contrast. Overall, this pie was really good, and not difficult to make. The most time-consuming part was making the truffles, but I made the truffles a few days in advance to help break up how long it would take.