Were I to make a list of my favorite sweets right up at the top you would find chocolate, ice cream, pie, and toffee. Well my some miracle there is a pie that combines all of those wonderful delicacies: Mississippi Mud Pie. This pie is composed of an oreo cookie crumb crust, a layer of chocolate with toffee embedded in it, ice cream for the filling, more chocolate on top, and then toffee sprinkled over it all. Talk about seventh heaven!!! Now you know that I love to make pies; (that really ought to be obvious by now) but did you know that I also love to make toffee? In fact, I started making toffee YEARS before I made my first pie. So with this skill at my fingertips no way was I going to buy toffee! I made my own; and since you have to let toffee cool for a bit, I made it first.
Toffee is actually REALLY simple. The only trick is getting it to just the right temperature. For most people that would mean using a candy thermometer. I don't happen to have one of those. I use my knowledge of toffee and what it looks like when it's ready. Toffee is made up of just five simple ingredients: sugar, vanilla extract, salt, and butter, and water. We'll start with step number one: melting the butter in a saucepan with the sugar,salt, and water.
It's important to do this over low heat so that the sugar and butter will combine completely and not separate later on. (I've tried melting the butter quickly before and it's just a disaster.) So you go ahead and let the butter melt until you reach a mixture that looks like this:
Once the butter is melted and safely combined with the sugar you can raise the temperature to medium-high heat and get to work stirring. The next ten minutes or so consist of watching the water that you added and from the butter boil off. As this happens the mixture bubbles and foams and has doubled in size from when the butter was initially all melted: (this picture is from right at the start of this step)
If you've taken High School Chemistry you'll know that a boiling pot of water will remain the same temperature until all the water has boiled away... the same is true of a pot of butter, sugar, and water. During that entire step the temperature remains just above boiling; but once the water is gone that changes dramatically. With the water gone the mixture collapses and begins to thicken as the temperature rises. The trick to making toffee is to take if off the heat when it is right between 300 and 320 degrees Fahrenheit. This would be simple with a candy thermometer... But as I said before, I haven't got one of those. Nope... I do things the old fashioned way. I use a water test. With a water test you drop a tiny bit of your mixture into a glass of cold water and see how it reacts. 300-320 degrees Fahrenheit is within the Hard Crack Stage. This means that when dropped in cold water the mixture lengthens out into a strand that snaps in your fingers. If you take if off too soon it isn't as hard as toffee is supposed to be and is more of a peanut-brittle. If you take it off too late your toffee will separate and you'll end up with a layer of oil on a hard chunk of stuff that doesn't taste all that great. As the mixture approaches this stage it looks like this:
Once the mixture has been pulled off the heat the vanilla extract is added and it is then spread across a sheet of parchment paper which is taped down on a cookie sheet. I typically let that cool just a bit and then put chocolate chips on they melt and I end up with chocolate covered toffee. (YUMM!!) For this however I didn't bother with the chocolate and just left my toffee like this:
It might look a little funny right there, but it tastes DEVINE. Now, moving on to that cookie crumb crust.
Cookie crumb crusts are SO much easier than regular pie crusts. No rolling, no tearing, no fuss. All you have is cookie crumbs, butter, and sugar. For this pie I used oreos. As my might know (as I hope you know) oreos have a delicious white filling... Well my mom helped me out with using a knife to scrape the filling out of all of the oreos and my siblings helped me out by eating all of the fillings... (I was amazed they could handle that much sugar.) Well once the filling had been removed I used our food processor to make cookies into cookie crumbs; and with the addition of butter and sugar, a cookie crumb crust was born.
As the crust baked I got to work on my chocolate.
This chocolate layer was not just plain chocolate... Not at all. This was an intense mixture of chocolate, butter, heavy cram, corn syrup, confectioners' sugar, and vanilla extract. (When I say intense I mean intense.) To combine these ingredients a double boiler must be used. I do not happen to have an "official" double boiler; but I do have a round metal bowl that fits quite nicely when placed over a pan. The key with a double boiler is to have the ingredients suspended in a metal bowl over an inch or two of boiling water. In this way the ingredients are slowly heated but avoid being burned. Here you can see my lovely make-shift double boiler as I mix the chocolate, butter, cream, and corn syrup:
Once those are all melted together the confectioners' sugar and vanilla are added and then the chocolate mixture is pored into the baked cookie crumb crust. (Saving some for the top layer of chocolate of course.) As if that wasn't enough during this step the toffee is crushed into bits and half of it is sprinkled on the chocolate so you get this yummy looking thing:
This is placed into the refrigerator to chill for a good hour... and then comes the ice cream.
The ice cream cannot just be smushed into the crust... that wouldn't work at all. Instead you mix the ice cream in a mixer until it is spreadable and spread it into your crust. The recipe calls for coffee ice cream... My family does not condone coffee. No coffee, no coffee ice cream, that's final. So what to use? The answer seemed simple, cookies and cream ice cream! With the ice cream spread into the crust it was starting to look even more delicious:
Then came a longer period of waiting as the pie was placed in the freezer for a good three hours to allow the ice cream to harden up again. During the last few moments of my waiting for the ice cream to be sufficiently hard I went ahead and reheated the chocolate mixture. Then I took out the pie and spread the chocolate over the ice cream. The key to this step would be that the chocolate needed to be spreadable, but not hot... I didn't quite succeed there and some of the ice cream melted and mixed in with the chocolate... But I didn't really mind. The last step was to take the final bits of toffee and sprinkle them on top. The finished product:
All of the best treats combined in the one perfect pie. My only big mistake here was that I got my chocolate mixture a bit hot when I was reheating it... But that still did not seem to mess up the taste of this pie at all. Though the name might be a bit strange (who would want to eat mud from the Mississippi?) Mississippi Mud Pie is officially my favorite pie of all time!
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