Coconut Chocolate Pie

It was my birthday last week. Yep, the big 3-0 & although I really don't have much of a problem with being 30, it still makes me giggle a little bit when I think of saying that I'm actually 30 (surely I am supposed to be way more mature than I am...) Plus, John's only 29 & it is somehow amusing to me that we're a "year" apart (actually 3 months).

Anyway, birthdays to me are always special. Mostly because that means there's a fancy dinner & scrumptious dessert around the corner. Growing up, my mom always let us pick what we were to have for dinner & what flavor cake she would bake for us. I usually always picked something chicken-oriented for dinner & always, always, always picked chocolate cake with chocolate frosting & chocolate ice cream. To me, a dessert just isn't quite dessert unless there's chocolate.

I've also kind of been obsessed with coconut lately, especially coconut oil (did you bake these yet?!) so when I found a recipe for coconut chocolate pie, I was sold. I was also pretty thrilled that the recipe calls for 5 ingredients. How simple is that? 

 All the ingredients needed for this pie: heavy cream, butter, unsweetened coconut, sugar (I used demerara) & chocolate

 Coconut chocolate pie
Ingredients
1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp unsalted butter
11 ounces unsweetened coconut
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
8 ounces bittersweet dark chocolate, finely chopped

Directions
Make the crust: Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a food processor, process butter & one-third of coconut & sugar until mixture forms a ball or starts to stick together, 1 to 2 minutes (next time I would pulse the coconut by itself first to make it into more of a powder). Transfer to a medium bowl. Combine this mixture with the remaining two-thirds coconut using your hands to bring together.

Press coconut mixture into bottom & up sides of pan to form crust, leaving top edges loose & fluffy. Cover the crust lightly with tin foil over the edges, & cut a hole in the center. Keeping the edges covered to prevent burning. Bake until center begins to brown, 10 to 15 minutes; remove foil & bake until edges are browned, 4 to 5 minutes more. Transfer crust to a wire rack to cool completely.

Make the filling: In a small sauce pan bring cream just to a boil. While cream is heating up, place chopped chocolate into a medium heatproof bowl. Pour the cream over the chocolate & let sit for 10 minutes to allow chocolate to melt. Stir to combine & melt remaining chocolate. The mixture should be smooth & completely melted. Pour into coconut crust. Refrigerate until filling is set, 1 hour or up to 1 day.

*I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but I ended up having maybe 2 cups more crust mixture than I could fit into my pie pan, so I happily used it in some trail mix that I made. Next time I make this pie (oh, there's gonna be a next time!) I plan to pulse the coconut a bit more before I add the butter & sugar so it's more powder-like & I plan to maybe add more butter because when we cut into the pie, the coconut was a bit too crumbly (yummy, but not as neat as my Type A personality would like).

Recipe adapted from Sweet Twist of Blogging