Chocolate & Lime Mud Pie
Have you ever noticed how bad things happen all at once? You’ll never get one bad thing happening at a time, nope. It starts off slowly, you wake up with a little pain in your back. Stretch it out, be grand. Then you go downstairs, only to discover there’s no milk left for breakfast. Damn, that’s lame. Might as well go get ready for work & pick up breakfast on my way there, no biggie. Then you go upstairs to put on your make up & BAM, the universe decided that today isn’t your day, & you discover that while you were sleeping your powder somehow smashed open & covered the entire contents of your make-up bag, even though it was fine yesterday. & you have no mascara left.
I know that kind of thing can’t just happen to me. It just can’t. (The universe has to pick on other people too, surely?) Maybe you haven’t had the exact same bad things happen to you (suicidal make-up powders can’t be that common), but I know everyone has days like this. Days when things just go wrong. It happens, & it’s easier to deal with them if you just let it happen. Stop trying to fight it, it’s going to happen, & it’s going to be crappy.
On days like this, I always turn to two things. The first being my bestest best friend, Karen. & the second being baking, my other best friend of sorts. These two kind of go hand in hand: when I’m feeling crappy & turn to Karen, she usually decides we need chocolate (duh), which in turn leads to us baking either a) fudgy fudge brownies or b) chocolate chip cookie bars (which have yet to make their blog debut). I mean, when was the last time chocolate didn’t make you feel better? It’s our fail-safe.
Girlie cravings aside, I bring up Karen because I more or less have her to thank for this entire mud pie. Also because she never got a birthday post, which is a long story involving my oven breaking & me having a mental breakdown, but we’ll leave that till another day. The plan was to make this pie for my birthday, using up the last of the limes I mentioned in my last post. What actually happened was that while I finished getting ready, did some last minute cleaning, & generally faffed about the place, Karen was slaving away in the kitchen making this delicious pie. That’s what best friends are for, right?
Now, let’s talk taste. We chose this recipe because we wanted to use up the limes & because it’s a chocolate mud pie. Hello, dense chocolatey goodness, get in my belly. We thought the lime would be a kind of subtle undertone, but it actually really stands out, emphasizing the chocolate flavour. It’s dense, it’s fudgy, it’s chocolatey, & it’s good.
Serves 10-12 (Adapted from Ruby Bakes)
Ingredients
150g of dark chocolate, broken into chunks
125g of salted butter, cubed
zest of 3 limes
3 eggs, separated
200g of caster sugar, divided in two
70g of plain flour
Method
Preheat your oven to 170 degrees C & grease & line the base of a loose-bottomed 9-inch cake tin.
Place the chocolate in a medium heat proof bowl & heat in the microwave for twenty seconds at a time until just about melted. Stir to melt completely. Once melted, stir the butter & lime zest into the chocolate & stir until the butter is melted. Leave to cool.
In a small/medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolks with 100g of the caster sugar. Mix until thick, creamy, paler in colour, & until the mixture falling from your whisk leaves a ribbon on the surface.
In a large bowl, beat the egg whites with your whisk until completely foamed up. While whisking, add the remaining 100g of caster sugar one tablespoon at a time, whisking well after each addition. Gradually the mixture will become thick & glossy, & will be complete when a soft peak of meringue is left behind when you slowly remove the whisk.
Fold the egg yolk mixture into the chocolate. Fold a third of this new chocolatey mixture into the egg whites. When it is pretty much combined but still marbled, add the next third, & continue on like this until everything is combined.
Sift half of the flour into mixture & gently fold until just combined, then repeat with the remaining flour, mixing until just combined, keeping as much air as possible in the mixture.
Spoon the mixture into the prepared cake tin & bake for 30-35 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin for 30 minutes before removing. The mud pie will sink down a little as it cools.
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