Chocolate Chess Pie Canapés

This week's recipe is another adaptation from Nothing in the House. In the original post, Emily Hilliard talks about the origin and nomenclature of this traditional pioneer dish, which was designed to be a feasible option, even if the baker's cupboards were rather bare. There are different versions of chess pie, but the chocolate one is my favorite because, well, chocolate anything is my favorite.

There are literally a handful of ingredients that go into this recipe, and all of them (perhaps minus the chocolate) would have been readily available to the average early American.

I was able to get exactly two dozen 2-inch canapés from Emily's recipe when I prepared them in a normal sized cupcake tin. However, I had to prepare twice the crust (enough for what would be a top AND bottom of a normal 9'' pie) to hold all the filling. I didn't have a biscuit cutter, so I substituted the rim of a tumbler to create even-sized bottom crusts. These fit properly in my baking tins with about half an inch coming up the sides.

The first step in making chocolate chess pie filling is to melt together butter and chocolate. Now, seeing as my go-to solutions when a recipe isn't tasting good are to either add butter or add chocolate, I was pretty stoked to kick things off this afternoon by adding the butter and chocolate (TO EACH OTHER!) right away.

Once the butter and chocolate are melted together, I took them off the stove to add sugar and cornmeal. This is the step where I felt most like a pioneer. As an avid Laura Ingalls Wilder fan in my youth, I got a little chill at this point in the recipe (just a little one, but still).

After the egg, vanilla, and salt are added to the mixture, the batter is ready to go into the waiting crust. I recently picked up a handy squeeze bottle that makes this filling step significantly neater and faster. I believe the bottle was originally meant for pancake batter, but it worked perfectly well for filling mini-pie crusts, too.

Literally less than two minutes later, these guys are ready to go into the oven. One suggestion I would make if you try this recipe yourself would be to reduce the cooking time by a good 15-20 minutes, and watch them closely as soon as the aroma of chocolate begins to emanate from your oven. I baked mine for about 40 minutes (where the original recipe called for 50-60), and they still came out a little over-done, in my opinion.

Here are the finished products, on the cooling rack and ready to party. I tried one for critical review and reporting purposes and I have a few notes. First of all, like I mentioned before, these would have benefited from coming out of the oven 5-10 minutes earlier. Also, it almost seems like there is too much crust in each bite, and the gooey, rich chocolate flavor has to fight to get through.

This recipe might (gulp) actually be better as a full-sized pie, or at least be improved if prepared in mini-tart pans which offer a smaller crust:filling ratio. I will test them out on my co-workers tomorrow and see what they think. A little dollop of cool whip might be just thing thing to bring everything together and compensate for the lack of balance going on here. (Cool whip is the pastry-equivalent to ketchup, right? Right.)