Accident Pie – Or How I Invented Chocolate Gummy

I was in the middle of a bunch of posts about the main gummy recipes since this week I developed a good clear gummy recipe as part of that flexible, edible stained glass ebook I’m working on. Then I got sidetracked by ensuring the recipes provided accurate measurements of gelatin for those not using pre-packed envelopes.

Then tonight I made Accidental Pie, which was the culmination of an error from earlier in the week.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…

Opaque gummy (which has a recipe in the Zombie Skin post for now until I actually get formatted recipes up) uses 5 envelopes of gelatin in sweetened, condensed milk. Not evaporated milk. No.

So there I was making some opaque gummy so I could do step-by-step photos for the stained glass ebook, but I was going fast because I needed to go pick my daughter up from school. I was also tired and under the influence of allergy meds. I grabbed a can out of the pantry, discovered that our can opener was dying, and used it to hack open the can partway.

See, if I’d been able to open the can fully, I’d have noticed it was evaporated milk and not sweetened condensed milk. The former is very liquid, the latter is goopy.

But I didn’t notice. I poured it. It splashed. I said [Many Rude Words]. Then I put plastic over the whole thing and went and picked my daughter up.

When I got home, it was cooled to room temperature, and kind of like too-soft gummy. Sigh. I put the whole pot in the fridge to deal with later, and made some proper opaque gummy to finish working on the photos for the ebook.

Two days later I searched around for recipes that involved unflavoured gelatin and evaporated milk. There were a lot of cheesecakes. I don’t like cheesecake (hey, don’t complain…that leaves more for you!). There were some pies that involved one or two envelopes of gelatin. I’d used five. But I evaluated a few different things and decided to make Accident Pie, which would be melting some chocolate into the milk-gummy mix and putting that in a pie shell with whipped cream on top. This was partly because I had a spare pre-made bit of pie dough in the freezer that needed to be used soon anyway.

So I baked the pie crust as per the box’s directions, then let it cool thoroughly. Then I took out the pot with the mistake-mix and it was a solid lump. Hrm. I began to have doubts about this, but was committed, so I slowly melted it over low heat.

Incidentally, while it was melting, my husband and I ran some tests with LEDs embedded in gummy. So that’s yet another post I need to make.

Once it was melted, I put in 12 oz of semi-sweet chocolate chips (standard bags are about 11.5 oz) and mixed until it was all a nice even liquid.

Then I poured it into the pie shell, and it promptly found its way through two cracks in the crust and ended up everywhere in the dish. Whoops. Heh.

Then I stuck that whole thing in the fridge overnight. Tonight I pulled it out of the fridge about two hours before dinner, then made some basic whipped cream (whip a 8oz/1 cup pack of heavy cream in a chilled bowl until thick, then add a tsp of vanilla and tbsp of powdered sugar, whip that in, done!) and plopped it on top.

The result?

Behold! Accident Pie!

Now before you get too excited by how good that looks, you need to understand that the reason the sides are so smooth is that the chocolate part is very chewy. Too chewy for pie, to be honest. How chewy is it? So chewy that Peo’s laughing in this picture because I’ve just made another loud Wookie-yell noise:

Star Wars jokes and chocolate pie? Why don't I have a Mom of the Millenium trophy?

It’s also pretty sticky, not in the stick-to-your-finger way, but in the could-use-this-as-glue way. In this photo, you can see where it leaked under the pie shell and glued the crust to the dish:

You can peel that stuff off the pie dish pretty easily, and the peelings are tasty, but they don't look nice.

This same recipe with one or two envelopes of gelatin would be quite tasty. As it is, it’s acceptable, but not awesome.

But more importantly, what we all agreed on was this: I just accidentally invented chocolate gummy.

Did you read that fully? CHOCOLATE GUMMY. Not chocolate-covered gummy; there’s plenty of that around. No, I mean gummy candy that is also chocolate.

Whoa. This is going to need a lot of further experimentation. So many questions need to be answered! Will it dry like other gummy? If so, will it stay flexible, or crack? Will it bond to other gummy? How well does it form to molds? Should I add a bit of sugar to make it a bit more sweet, or maybe corn syrup? Will it form a semi-solid state that will allow for piping/extruding, the way regular gummy does not? How many nerd points do I get if I make chocolate gummy Lego minifigs? And who will help me eat all of the results?

Stay tuned…gummy just got a whole lot niftier.