Messy and Picky

When I was growing up, my (nearly life-long vegetarian) sister used to make the most delicious chocolate tofu pie. For those who've never tried it, you can't actually taste the tofu, it just provides a super smooth and creamy texture with minimal effort. Everyone always loved this pie, even though we didn't always divulge the secret ingredient. For her birthday this year, my sister made a grown-up version of chocolate tofu pie in the form of a fancy cake with a cashew crust and raspberry sauce and toasted candied almonds. We happened to be visiting at the time and got the chance to taste some — it was divine. It was so delicious, in fact, that I decided to make myself the same cake for my birthday.

Since it's hard for me to eat nuts (I am sadly rocking adult braces for at least another few months) I figured I would make a graham-cracker crust instead. Then, I thought, wouldn't a chocolate cookie crust be even better? Then I figured I would do away with the raspberry sauce and whip up some cream on the side instead. So basically, I decided to make a different cake all together. There are a lot of recipes for chocolate tofu pie online and I combined a bunch of them to make this one. I made a terrible mistake by forgetting to melt the chocolate (you can see in the picture that the pie is a little grainy) but it turned out to be quite tasty nonetheless.

Ingredients

Crust:
20-25 cookies, crushed [I used Paul Newman's vegan version of Oreos - Newman-O's]
about 4 Tbsp butter or vegan margarine

Filling:
16 oz Silken tofu
1 package (12 oz) Chocolate Chips [If you are serving vegans, make sure the chips are vegan, many aren't!]
1 tsp Vanilla

Directions
To make the crust: Crush up the cookies. Mix with approx. 3 1/2 Tbsp of margarine or butter. Pour into a buttered (or margarined) pie plate. Bake at 350°F for about 8 minutes. Allow to cool completely.

To make the filling: Mix the tofu and vanilla in the blender. Melt the chocolate chips using a double boiler (or equivalent) over medium heat. Add melted chocolate to the blender and mix until smooth. Pour mixture into pie crust and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Serve small slices, as this pie is really rich. We served it with slightly sweetened, homemade whipped cream (Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market has some wonderful local heavy cream). I have not made vegan whipped cream yet, but I hear it can be done with coconut milk. If anyone has a tried-and-true recipe, I'm interested!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Dessert, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.