… and Mom wants a whole one
Ingredients for the Mini Grasshopper Pies include heavy cream, food coloring, peppermint extract, vanilla extract, milk, butter, chcolate sandwich cookies and marshmallow fluff.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, and Pi Day, our TL test cook made Mini Grasshopper Pies. And she’s had the green hat on her desk in the newsroom all year, since last March.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
“Oh, so good!” reporter Jen Learn-Andes said after tasting one of the Mini Grasshopper Pies I made this week in the Times Leader Test Kitchen. “It’s decadent,” she added. “Refreshing and cool.”
“Absolutely delicious!” echoed Maureen Dessoye from the TL production department. “Thank you so much!”
“It tastes good,” said reporter Margaret Roarty. “And it’s a good palate cleanser.”
I was especially glad to have pleased these three co-workers because five other potential taste testers declined to try a sample, with several claiming an aversion to mint and one of them — oh, perhaps Bill O’Boyle was pulling my leg — hinting at an aversion to eating insects.
For anybody who might be confused, there are no grasshoppers in a grasshopper pie. It’s named after a classic drink called a Grasshopper that uses Creme de Menthe and Creme de Cacao to give it a minty, chocolately flavor. In my little pies I used peppermint extract and vanilla extract instead of the liqueurs.
But I did add food coloring because, with St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching, I figured my gang of taste testers deserved a nice green treat.
And, since these little snacks are pies, they’d also be a nod to “Pi Day,” which is March 14. (In case your high school geometry is but a mist-shrouded memory, 3.14 is the beginning of a long sequence of numbers that equals the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, also known as “pi.”)
Anyway, the recipe I ended up using is a combination of two or three I saw online — and I enjoyed the result. So did the folks back in my neighborhood. In fact, two days after I made the pies, I had three left over to share with Mark, my mom and my visiting sister. And I would gladly have skipped having a pie myself. But then ….
“I’ll split one with you, Mom,” my sister offered.
“No,” said my mom, somewhat uncharacteristically for a self-sacrificing matriarch. But then, she already knew what the pies were like. “I want a whole one.”
“I’ll split one with you, Liz,” I told my sister. “If you’re sure you only want half.”
Truth be told, these pies taste so much like mint ice cream, I think you could be equally happy opening a carton from the store. But if you want to put forth a little more effort for St. Patrick’s Day, and maybe for Pi Day, here is the recipe I used:
Mini Grasshopper Pies
12 coarsely chopped chocolate sandwich cookies (such as Oreos)
1.5 cups marshmallow fluff
1/4 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter
1.5 teaspoons peppermint extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a few drops of green food coloring
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy whipping cream
12 muffin tin liners
Coarsely chop the chocolate cookies in a food processor or by sealing them in a plastic bag and crushing them. (I left the cookie filling in the mix, but you could scrape it away if you want a less-sweet pie.)
In a saucepan, melt the marshmallow fluff with the milk and butter, whisking over low heat. Remove from heat and add 2 tablespoons of heavy cream, the extracts and the food coloring. Chill the mixture about 40 minutes.
Using a stand mixer, whip the remaining 3/4 cup of whipping cream until soft peaks form. Then fold the whipped cream into the mint mixture. Set aside.
For the crust, evenly spread the cookie mixture into the bottoms of your muffin liners.
Add the mint mixture on top of the cookie mixture, evenly spreading it out among the 12 little pies.
Chill for at least 2 hours before serving. For decoration, I tried drizzling melted chocolate on top of each one but didn’t think the toppings looked attractive at all — certainly not the one that resembled the outline of the state of Idaho and not even the one that sort of looked like the symbol for Pi. So I covered the toppings with more cookie crumbs.
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