The pastry was fairly straight forward, using the kitchen aid for all of it (apart from a bit of hand mixing to make sure it had scraped all the butter from the bottom of the bowl after adding the egg). I didn't have a pastry ring, so was going to use my trusty 9" loose bottom pie dish. Rolled out fine, although seemed to roll out larger than needed when going for the right thickness. Still, the off cuts went to making some biscuits with Poppy choosing the biscuit cutters.
Hmm.. the typical slump down the sides did look like there wouldn't be enough space for the topping. Plus my fork holes at the bottom weren't sufficient, so half way through cooking the bottom of the pie case was risen up with lots of hot air underneath, cue the three emergency tracheotomies visible here.
So on reflection, there was just about enough time to make some more pasty and chill for a couple of hours, then to line the case with greaseproof paper and use pie weights to fill up the middle. The pasty now rose up slightly above the sides of the dish during cooking, but flattening back down after coming out of the oven. This did mean it was harder to judge the cooking time, but then again the first time I pretty much guessed anyway, so no real insight lost.
The extra case did mean that I didn't really have enough time to cool it, so made the mistake of taking it out of the pie dish and onto the cooling rack. Not a really good plan, since it wasn't stable enough to do this safely. Topping was fairly straight forward, leaving the kitchen aid on whisk for a while. Still, filled with the topping it looked okay. Not as 'brim full' as the recipe wants, but it wouldn't have fitted at all in the previous case. So clearly we're expecting something inbetween,
After cooling and serving it looked like this. Very very rich, but really quite nice - apart from that we were too full from our Chinese New Year dinner to eat much... Still, quite a bit left over for tomorrow.
Things to remember for next time
- Think about using pie weights - maybe half full with weights to get the right height?
- Investigate getting a proper pastry ring, would this help the sides sinking down during cooking?
- Leave it in the ring/dish to cool, and make sure it has an hour or two to cool before starting to make the topping.
- Perhaps have the chocolate/butter mixture hotter before adding to the eggs/sugar? A little unsure whether it was cooling down too much and forming into pieces again, since it wasn't very hot yet melted.
- Use a bigger spatula when folding in the chocolate. I did this in the kitchen aid bowl, which doesn't really help since it's tall and narrow, probably mixing it in a shorter wider bowl would have been easier. I couldn't help thinking that I was reducing the volume of the egg/sugar mixture quite a bit by mixing too much to combine the chocolate properly.