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Chocolate Mousse Pie Update
Dec. 13th, 2015 09:42 amIt came out quite well, the spousal unit quite enjoyed it. The peppermint candies were a nice addition. The pretzels were not as successful as I'd hoped: the moisture from the pie basically disintegrated them. So no pretzel flavor, but the addition of the salt did enhance things.
So two additional experiments to run over time. The first, and easiest, is the next time that I do a regular choc mousie pie, after it sets drizzle some fleur de sel salt over the top. It is a larger, flake-like crystal, and if the pie has already set, I think it might not dissolve readily. And if it hasn't dissolved, it'll provide a small crunch component, which is something that I was hoping the pretzels would give me. I can get it in Phoenix next week: in addition to Williams-Sonoma, Trader Joe's for the last couple of years has done a fleur de sel/truffle salt that's pretty good and only offered during the holidays.
The second thing to try is to use small pretzel sticks instead of the large ones. My idea is to, instead of smashing them up with a knife, break them in to smaller pieces. I think, with little or no justification for the thought, that the skin of the pretzel might be a bit more resistant to moisture, and that by breaking it, I'm minimizing exposing the white flesh of the pretzel innards to the pie and am thus increasing the chance that it might survive chilling in the pie.
Of course, I could always teach myself how to make pretzels and customize them in the size that I want. The basics of it aren't difficult, the tricky bit is the timing how long you put them in the boiling baking soda water, or at least that's what I gathered from the Great British Baking Challenge a couple of months ago. There's also the challenge of baking at high altitude: we live at 9,000'. Got about 6-8" of snow yesterday/last night.
So two additional experiments to run over time. The first, and easiest, is the next time that I do a regular choc mousie pie, after it sets drizzle some fleur de sel salt over the top. It is a larger, flake-like crystal, and if the pie has already set, I think it might not dissolve readily. And if it hasn't dissolved, it'll provide a small crunch component, which is something that I was hoping the pretzels would give me. I can get it in Phoenix next week: in addition to Williams-Sonoma, Trader Joe's for the last couple of years has done a fleur de sel/truffle salt that's pretty good and only offered during the holidays.
The second thing to try is to use small pretzel sticks instead of the large ones. My idea is to, instead of smashing them up with a knife, break them in to smaller pieces. I think, with little or no justification for the thought, that the skin of the pretzel might be a bit more resistant to moisture, and that by breaking it, I'm minimizing exposing the white flesh of the pretzel innards to the pie and am thus increasing the chance that it might survive chilling in the pie.
Of course, I could always teach myself how to make pretzels and customize them in the size that I want. The basics of it aren't difficult, the tricky bit is the timing how long you put them in the boiling baking soda water, or at least that's what I gathered from the Great British Baking Challenge a couple of months ago. There's also the challenge of baking at high altitude: we live at 9,000'. Got about 6-8" of snow yesterday/last night.
