Yes, it could be prettier, but oh god, it was delicious. I took two recipes from Cooking Light Magazine and stuck them together to create what I think was a much better dessert. I felt like making a graham cracker pie crust instead of a normal pie crust, and I needed to get rid of the whipped topping and replace it with something else. I am also, as of late, making a ridiculous amount of custard, and this recipe was slightly different than Alice Medrich's multi-purpose pastry cream.Crust:
1 cup graham wafers
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tbsp molasses (or just use 1/3 brown sugar instead of the regular sugar and molasses. I like the taste of a bit of Crosby molasses better than the lack of flavor of the bagged brown sugar)
2 tbsp melted butter
Mix the ingredients together with a spoon and press into a 9" pie dish. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. Done. Hurray. Next.
Filling:
2 cups golden raisins (I didn't have golden raisins and sultanas are not what you should use. I was out of luck, though. They just ended up a lot chewier and didn't plump up very much)
1/3 cup dark rum
1/2 cup sugar
3 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups almond breeze (or milk)
3 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla
Microwave the rum and raisins in a microwave-safe bowl for 1 minute. They were supposed to plump up, but nope. Apparently they don't absorb rum as well as I do. It seemed like there were way too many raisins for the amount of rum, so after a minute I stirred them to get the un-submerged raisins soaked in rum too, and then I re-microwaved the dish. I think I got drunk on fumes, but I wasn't going to mess with the amount of liquid in the recipe to get the raisins covered.
In a large bowl whisk the sugar, cornstarch, salt and eggs. Scald the milk in a heavy saucepan over medium heat until tiny bubbles start to form around the side of the pan (180 degrees on a candy thermometre. Don't let the milk boil. Almond milk won't curdle like regular milk, so it's not such a big deal, but it's a waste of time, it may still get a kind of skin, and it may scramble your eggs in the next step). Whisk the milk into the eggs in a thin stream, slowly enough to not scramble the eggs. then pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly (don't use a metal whisk in a metal saucepan that shouldn't get scratched like I did...) until the custard is thick. Then I used Alice Medrich's trick of cooking for an extra 30-45 seconds after you think it's thick enough to make sure it was perfect.
Quickly pour the custard from the pan into a large bowl and add the butter. The recipe says add the butter to the pan, but if you don't have it there ready to go it can be dangerous to stop whisking the custard while you go to get it. You don't want the custard to burn and stick to the bottom of the pot, and it's not going to get too cool to melt the butter that quickly if you dump it immediately into another bowl before adding it.
Then stick the bowl into a pan of ice for 10 minutes until the custard comes to room temperature. A little water along with the ice helps cover more of the bowl surface area and cool it faster. When it's cool, remove it from the ice and stir in the vanilla and rum raisins. Then pour the custard into the crust.
My partridgeberry sauce was just a jam spread over the top of the custard, cheat that I am. A thin layer was all it needed. It wasn't too acidic, and the rich flavour of the eggs was nicely cut by the sweetened fruit. Alternately, you could make a sauce of puréed fruit (raspberries if there are no partridgeberries) with sugar and heated in a saucepan. Maybe add a drop of lemon juice after the sugar melts and you turn off the heat. You can also use gelatin or agar-agar to thicken it into a glaze or jelly. Garnish as you wish, maybe with some fresh berries or sprigs of mint. Ooh! Or maybe some kind of broken butter cookie pieces to match the graham cracker crust.
Absolutely delicious, and lighter than either of the recipes I mashed up separately. My music technology teacher probably would have given me an even better mark on this cream pie than on my final project mash-up of Jason Bajada's "You Are A Runner, I Am My Father's Son" and a cover of Sean Paul's "Beautiful Girls". Much more delicious this way and much less emotional. Girl Talk would probably still kick this pie's ass, though. No disrespect to the pie. Glee? Well, I don't have their budget. If I had the budget for pie that they had for their mash-up episode maybe my pie would win. I could at least bribe the judges with pie...
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