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!

We almost feel bad publishing the photos and further publishing the recipe of e's coconut toffee almond crunch cookies. Why? They're so damn good you may never go back to making other cookies. They're no harder than making your basic chocolate chip cookie, just a couple more ingredients. Picky met e at the food blogger potluck (Messy was out of town) and he had half a dozen cookies that night. Having several glasses of Dave's wine helped a bit in eating as much as he did, but it was the magic of the cookie that had me coming back and finishing off the cookies e brought when she was about to leave.

You can go here for the recipe and below [and above] are a few photos of the process. The shot above is everything mixed in and just before we spooned the dough onto the cookie sheet.

We didn't have any parchment paper or a silicon mat, so used some aluminum foil. It worked okay, but the toffee stuck to it a bit and it wasn't the easiest thing to scrape off. Since then, we've bought some parchment paper for future batches.

And here's the first 2 sheets of cookies. We think all in all, they filled 4 of those Chinese food containers for storage. They didn't last long though, a little over a week and we had 4 left. The only thing that slows Picky down in eating them is having milk on hand to drink with the cookies; the only thing that slows Messy down are her cavities! Picky's gotta have his milk and cookies.

Two Fat Als (neither of which are fat!) baked themselves some of these delicious cookies too. Theirs look a bit different. Picky thinks our oven is running hot. Gotta pick up one of those oven thermometers that Mark suggests; his oven was running a solid 50° hot he found out!

The only trick about this recipe is finding the Heath 'Bits 'o Brickle' toffee pieces pictured here. So far, the gang has put together a shortlist of places to find them around them around Philly: Shop Rite down in South Philly and Fresh Grocer in University City. We took the trip down to South Philly and picked up 2 packages.

You've been warned. These cookies are addictive.