Chocolate Pie with Slow Cooker Chocolate Custard

My blog birthday dessert! A chocolate pie with a crunchy cookie crust, a heavenly layer of creamy chocolate custard (made super easily in the slow cooker) and a fluffy topping of whipped mascarpone cream. And somewhere in all that there's some ouzo!

A couple of weeks ago it was The Foodie Corner’s birthday. Yup, it’s one whole year old! Where did that year go? Of course I’m talking about the original, Greek version, not these pages here which are still fairly new. I’m very happy with where I am at the moment, I feel that I’ve made significant progress with the blog and it’s all starting to come together. I even met someone the other day who knew the blog before me! She said she thought I looked familiar when we met and then realised who I was. I can’t even describe how thrilled I was.

Slow cooker sales are moving slowly but steadily, which is all I could hope for in a market where nobody knows what they are! Seriously, very few people in Greece have ever heard of these wonderful gadgets, and I’ve made it my personal mission to introduce as many as possible to this convenient way of cooking. It’s a slow process but it’s happening. On Sunday I even participated in an exhibition with a little table of my own, beautiful flyers and an ad in the catalogue! How about that? It was really busy and I got to tell loads of people how fantastic slow cookers are.

So I bet you’re wondering why this recipe is in the slow cooker category. Or maybe not because I gave it away in the lead paragraph. Well, custard. Chocolate flavoured. From scratch. And easy, oh so easy. Did I mention it’s sort of lightened up? There is no cream in it. Just evaporated milk which makes it wonderfully creamy. All you need to make this (um, apart from the ingredients) is a pudding basin, or any bowl that’s heatproof and fits in the slow cooker stoneware. You could even use ramekins and make individual custard pots; this stuff is eat-plain-with-a-spoon worthy. The other day I had a huge bowl of chocolate custard with a chopped banana mixed in, and my mum tried it with a pear as well. Yum. Or, you can make this pie. Yes, make this pie.

I say pie, but maybe you want to call it cheesecake because it has a crushed biscuit (cookie) crust. Or silk pie (not sure why people call it that, maybe it’s the silky chocolate layer?). Whatever. It won’t be around for long enough for its name to make a difference. The cream on top? That’s also pretty special. It’s got mascarpone in it. This is most important if you are making the pie in Greece, where good old double cream is not available. Whipped double cream would probably be fine on its own, but the mascarpone does add a wonderful richness to the single cream we have here. And last but not least, the twist on the custard ingredients. Ouzo. Instead of vanilla extract. Wait, what? Yup, ouzo. It actually goes really well with chocolate. You can’t taste it, so don’t worry if you don’t like it – hey, I’m not the biggest fan of the stuff – it just adds something that I cannot describe. Trust me. So, when are you making it?