Birthday....Pie

The Lovely Man has turned 34. He put in an aside request as he left for work 'If you were thinking of doing a cake for my birthday, that pie with the Peppermint Crisp top is really delicious'. Let's take that as a hint, shall we?

No complaints from me, when he asks for a 'cake' which requires no baking, and in fact, can be pulled together wonderfully quickly. The recipe comes from Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros. It's an obscenely decadent pie - which is, when all is said and done, one of the points of a birthday really! If you know this recipe, you'll understand why my sweet-toothed, chocolate and peppermint loving Man wants this for his birthday, if you don't know it, read on, it wont be long before you'll get it!

Peppermint Crisp Pie

250g of Digestive or similarly plain, sweet biscuit works
100g butter, melted
600g caramel condensed milk ('Top n Fill', Dulce de Leche etc or cook your own tin of sweetened condensed milk)
400ml whipping cream (thickened cream is what I use here)
100g Peppermint Crisp (I buy extra)

Either by hand, or in a processor (my preference) crush up the biscuits and then pour in the butter. I like to add one of the extra Peppermint Crisp that I have acquired to the processor, but it's not part of the original instructions.

Press the combined crumbs into a 26cm pie dish (I chill my pie dish in the freezer to make it easier). Put the dish into the fridge for the base to firm up.

The recipe calls for about 1 1/2 cans of the caramel. I suspect that by the time we've had a little 'taste' then about a half a can is left, but I have never bothered to measure. Less or more, it will still work. When the caramel comes out of the tin, it looks like a semi-solid mass. You need to mix it (just with a spatula or spoon) to smooth it out, and make it more of a runny consistency. This will make it easy to pour over the base without disturbing the crumbs. I try to avoid spreading it so much as pouring it evenly over.

I usually stop here and cover the pie with cling wrap until ready to serve. I don't like whipped cream sitting in the fridge for a long time, though Tessa does suggest this pie is delicious the next day, I think it's at it's best when freshly topped with cream.

Whip the cream until it holds it's shape well, but don't over beat it. Spread the cream over the caramel to cover the surface almost completely (a little peek of caramel here and there is fine by me).

Crumble the Peppermint Crisp into larger and smaller bits and sprinkle this over, I suspect that I end up with an extra bit of the chocolate on the top, each bar is about 30g, I would easily put 4 bars on, perhaps 5.

The suggestion is that this can be difficult to slice, and so you might want to just scoop it out, but I haven't found it too difficult to slice.

Serves 10-12

Peppermint Crisp are a light and thin chocolate bar filled with a green, mint-flavoured brittle toffee.



The base, with it's flecks of green crispy bits.