Easy non bake chocolate pie

I must thank my friend Cindy for sharing her recipe. She posted a picture of a pie sitting in her fridge and it tempted me. She said it is easy and share her recipe and so I went ahead to buy the required ingredients and get my hands on it after my hubby came back from business trip.

The pie is easy for old baker (started baking like 2 yrs ago and an old auntie too lah) but newbie (cos I do not bake that often and never learn from mistakes!) like me. Only four ingredients are required and I do not need to bake it too. Best of all, the pie crust is "broken down" by the help of a machine (my grinder) and it is the first time I use it for this purpose. Why did I use my hand to crush the oreo biscuits when I made my cheese cake the last time round?

Anyway, I lined the pie pan, poured the sandy and moist looking digestive biscuit into it, press the crumbs as evenly as I can with patience and put it into the freezer. Then I cooked the nestle cream and pour it into my chocolate buttons and stir with my hand whisk.

The completed product went into the fridge while the kids crowd around me, what else, but for the chocolate coating around the mixing bowl.

Here's the complete pie and a slice of it. I will get my friend's permission before I post her recipe here. Meanwhile, do enjoy the pictures. Hehehe.

 






Yum! My kids love it and keep asking for it! Now you want to do that for your kids?

After gotten my friend's permission, here's the recipe. She mentioned it is from a Food and Travel Mag. Thank you again, Cindy. Here it is :-

For the crust :

180g digestive biscuits
90g butter, melted

Blitz biscuits into fine sand using food processor. Stir in melted butter. Press mixture into a 24 cm tart tin. Chill in fridge while you prepare the filling.

Filling :

280g dark chocolate, chopped
260g cream

Bring cream to boil in a saucepan. Remove from heat and pour over your bowl of chopped chocolate. Stir it until cream and chocolate combined into a smooth and shiny mixture.
Fill tart tin with the chocolate mixture and chill at least for 4 hours.

A quick bead item

My girl came back from school one day to say that her classmates like her bracelet and has ask her to do one for them. So while she is beading for her classmate, I did a quick one too.

This rectangular bead is from a bracelet that is done during one of the beading lessons a few years back. I pair it up with bicone beads. This earring reminds me of a simple chinese lantern.

There, simple enough.

I hope I get more chances to bead and bake in this coming school holiday. Holiday starting soon .... 

Volcanoes

It has been more than two months since I last did any baking. But I still borrows books on baking and beading from the library. Recently I borrowed a book titled "Crave" which has all these recipes using cream cheese. I marked a few to be tried but after 6 weeks (I extended the deadline) I still have no time for them. I quickly did a "photo"copy of the easier recipe by snapping the recipe using my phone camera before I bookdropped it unreluctantly. Did I violate any copyright law?

So now that the exam is over, I decided to give it a try. Not only my skills (if I had any) are dusty, the mixer is also dusty, so I had more preparation work. I wiped the mixer clean, prepare the bowls that I need, weight the ingredients, blah blah blah. It took me 2 hours from preparation till the end products "emerge" from the oven. Luckily I am not cooking dinner.

The little thing I baked this time is called Volcanoes. They look like this (picture taken from the book).



Nice ya? But mine did not look like this at all. The cheese part of my cupcake sank all the way to the bottom. My volcanoes are dormant ones. :-)

The cheese part is pretty easy to mix, all done by hand, and I used icing sugar instead of caster sugar. I am not sure what is superfine caster sugar anyway. I added 10g more of icing sugar because I have understood from a baking class trainer that we can add 10g more if we want to replace caster with icing sugar.

The cake batter part is not that difficult either. However, my batter has this grainy look which I am not sure if that should be the case. It kind of look like the egg is not fully incorporated into the batter. The recipe called for large eggs, but since my eggs are small, I used 1 instead of 1/2 for the cream cheese filling and 2 instead of 1 and half for the batter mixture. Was it the extra egg? Or the shortage of cocoa powder? I tried to make up with flour thou.

Assembly time. The "assembling" instruction says that a cavity should be made with the back of the spoon, but my batter is not of that consistency and the cavity "cave" in rather fast and so I have to be quick. I use one spoon to try make the cavity and the other hand quickly pour the cheese mix in. Actually, the cheese mix still kind of stay at the top. In the end of the assembling process, I have alot of cheese mix left and I have to create little cupcakes of cheese mix with chocolate cake base.

After 35 minutes of baking (5 minutes more than required, kiasi lah), I took them out. They looked puffed up and baked. However upon cooling, I noticed they shrunk. No matter how they looked, they passed the taste test. The cake is very soft and very moist (fudgy a better word?). The kids like it, I like it and now, 2nd day after the volcanoes are baked, they are all gone. I ate at least 5 of them, for taste test and QA (on the 2nd day) etc. However, something puzzles me. On the 2nd day (ie today) I noticed the top of a few cupcakes are glossy, and the cross section shows a layer of frosting lookalike at the top. I hope I have a teacher ready for me to ask these kind of questions.

Here's how my volcanoes look.




And now, here is the recipe. (Makes 12 cupcakes)

Ingredients

Cream Cheese Filling

Cream cheese 115g (4oz)
Caster (superfine) sugar 70g(2 and half oz)
Vanilla Essence 1/4 tsp
Egg 1/2 large, lightly beaten

Fudgy Chocolate Cupcake batter (Now then I realise cupcake is of fudgy nature)

Cake flour 100g (3 and 1/2 oz)
Cocoa powder 5 and 3/4 Tbsp
Baking powder 3/4 tsp
Salt 1/3 tsp
Butter 100g
Castor (superfine) sugar 70g
Light brown sugar 70g
Vanilla essence 2/3 tsp
Eggs 1 and 1/2 large, lightly beaten
Milk 140ml

Method

Prepare cream cheese filling. In a medium bowl, blend cream cheese, sugar and vanilla essence until smooth and creamy. Gradually add egg, beating until smooth. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 180 degree Celcius. Line a 12 hole cupcake tin with paper cups.

Prepare cupcake batter. In a medium bowl, stir together cake flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt until well blended. Set aside.

Wtih an eclectric mixer, cream butter, castor sugar and light brown sugar at medium speed until smooth and fluffy. Gradually blend in vanilla essence and eggs until well incorporated.

Lowe speed and add flour mixture and milk in 3 separate additions, starting and ending with flour mixture. Make sure each addition is fully incorporated into batter before adding the next.

Divide batter evenly among paper cups, Create a cavity in the centre of each cupcake with the back of a spoon. Fill cavities with cream cheese filling.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until tops are lightly browned and spring back when gently pressed. Leave to cool in tin for 10 minutes.

Remove cupcakes form bing and leave to cool completely on a wire rack before serving. The cupcakes can be stored, covered, at room temperature for up to 3 days, or in the regfrigerator for up to 1 week.

Now you may want to have a go at it.

p/s : I used another editor and do not know how to have the recipe type out in proper spacing. Sorry.
p/s : Since I have so much of the cheese filling left, I think I should have added more to each cupcake and then the cheese mixture will not sink down?