Easy German Chocolate Pie Recipe
Welllllp, didn’t win the pie contest – AGAIN. Haha! You would have just thought they would have pity on my soul and have picked mine – especially since my husband was one of the judges! But nope! Haha! And sadly it was our last contest! The pie contest seemingly turned in to something it wasn’t this year and not everyone was happy with how it was ran so it has been cancelled for next year – I guess it put me out of my misery of losing every year! :]
Maybe a less competitive tradition would be better anyways? I would love to start watching every Thanksgiving episode of Friends for our new tradition, but it seems like each year it gets harder and harder for everyone to come over. Everyone has other families and in laws they have to visit or work and everyone only shows up right before it’s time to eat instead of being around the house while we are cooking and hanging out and helping. It makes me sad, but there are so many different things going on in everyone’s lives it’s hard to get everyone’s schedules aligned so we can all be there at the same time! But that’s life and growing up, unfortunately! Maybe my hubby and I can start watching Friends as our little family tradition! :]
We also had another contest between my mom’s chocolate pie and my aunt’s chocolate pie. A little background about the pies: my mother bakes a rich chocolate pie every year which is her late mother’s recipe – all of us “kids” love it! My aunt had gotten a recipe (well, an ingredient list) and made a similar chocolate pie, but made it a different way. The judges were picked based on them being ‘unbiased’ unlike her kids. But I kind of felt like should be biased.. They ended up picking my aunt’s pie over my mom’s – which looked like it broke my mom’s heart in a million pieces when they announced it. She even had to ask again in disbelief. When is it okay to white lie for someone else’s good? Maybe it’s just me – but I don’t care if someone put a steaming crap in a pie shell I probably would have picked it if I knew how much it meant to them. Haha! Am I just crazy? Should honesty always be the best policy?
It seems like everything in good fun turned bad this year – we can only hope that next year it works out better! Who knows what we will do, but maybe it’s for the best – 8 different pies isn’t exactly good for the figure anyways.. :]
The contest winner was a banana cream pie – which looked delicious! I didn’t get to eat any pie because I was literally filled to capacity with the Thanksgiving dinner! My other brother and his wife made a crazy concoction of three layers of a pie within a cake. I’m pretty sure it weighed more than their 3 month old son! I made a German chocolate pie for the contest. It was pretty rich, but very good! I was actually very proud of the crust design I made! A family member showed me how to mold the dough with my fingers to create it. I found the recipe for the German Chocolate Pie (HERE).
My mother taught me to be sure to use a fork to poke holes all the way through the crust so it doesn’t bubble up when it cooks. I would have never thought of that! :]
Ingredients:
FILLING:
- 4 ounces German sweet chocolate, chopped
- 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
- 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
- 4 egg yolks
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
TOPPING:
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
- 1/4 cup butter, cubed
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 cup flaked sweetened coconut
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup chopped pecans
Directions:
- Pick your pie shell of choice and prepare accordingly (I used a pre made dough).
- In a microwave, melt chocolates in a large bowl; stir until smooth. Cool slightly. Whisk in condensed milk, egg yolks and vanilla; stir in pecans. Pour into crust. Bake 16-19 minutes or until set. Cool 1 hour on a wire rack.
- Meanwhile, in a small heavy saucepan, combine brown sugar, cream and butter. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove from heat.
- In a small bowl, whisk a small amount of hot mixture into egg yolks; return all to pan, whisking constantly. Cook 2-3 minutes or until mixture thickens and a thermometer reads 160°, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in coconut and vanilla; cool 10 minutes.
- Pour over filling; sprinkle with pecans. Refrigerate 4 hours or until cold. (I refrigerated the pie over night and set it out a couple of hours before we ate it. It is too dense to eat straight from the fridge cold – it was too hard.)
Here are some more fun photos from Thanksgiving:
The judges!
The winners! The banana cream pie! (And yes, I did make that absolutely ridiculously awesome turkey crown.)
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