A Mississippi Mud Pie to Trump Them All
“Politics, these days, is no occupation for an educated man. Ignorance and total lousiness are better….A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue”
Aristophanes
Today Trump has trumped Cruz, Kasich and Rubio in the Mississippi Republican primaries (also Michigan)… what should he be celebrating with? A slice of Mississippi Mud Pie of course! But probably not this one, which is a little unconventional… avant garde almost.
The Saucy Dressings chief taster was highly sceptical when he first saw what was on offer. I’ve carried out a number of experiments and the final preferred approach, daringly lacking as it does a surface layer of gooey chocolate froth, has a pretty solid look to it….a blow on the head with one of these pies made to my recipe could fell an enemy…
However, post-tasting he admitted that his fears were wholly unfounded and “that cake was really very good”. Unmitigated approval in other words.
Its dense bulk offers some advantages. It travels well – if you have offered to take a pudding to your hosts, this is one which will look pretty much the same on arrival as it did on departure.
It will also keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks. And you don’t need much of it because it’s so rich. One cake will feed, well perhaps not thousands, but certainly a reasonable gathering.
The key to its success is, appropriately enough, a very American ingredient of which Trump, I am sure, would approve – the Oreo biscuit.
Mississippi Mud Pie
Ingredients
• 2 x 154g packs of oreo biscuits
• 100g/3.5 oz/two-fifths of a brick of butter AND
• 250g/8 oz/a whole brick of butter
• 200 ml/¾ cup plus a tablespoon whipping cream
• 1 tbsp vanilla dusting powder, or icing sugar
• 1 tsp good quality Dutch cocoa
• 200g/7 oz dark chocolate (80%)
• 1 x 454g/16 oz tin of golden syrup
• 4 eggs
• double cream to serve
Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 150°C (use the aga simmering oven, middle shelf).
2. Grease a 23cm/9” spring form cake tin and line the base and sides with baking paper.
3. Melt two-fifths of a brick of butter in a small saucepan.
4. Either put the biscuits in a plastic bag and bash with a rolling pin to crumbs, or whizz in a magimix.
5. Put the melted butter in a mixing bowl or magimix together with the biscuit crumbs and mix until wet and sandy. Resist the impulse to wash up the saucepan.
6. Using the back of a wooden or silicon spoon, press the biscuit crumbs down into the cake tin to form a base which curves up slightly at the sides.
7. Bake for 15 minutes, and don’t turn off the oven.
8. Melt and mix gently the whole brick of butter; all the chocolate except for two or three squares; and the golden syrup. Take off the heat as soon as all is nicely melded.
9. Meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl beat the eggs.
10. When the chocolate mixture has cooled a little (you don’t want to scramble the eggs) add it to the eggs.
11. Pour the mixture onto the biscuit base and return to the oven for about an hour (check it after 40 minutes, it should still be a bit loose in the middle – it firms up when it cools).
12. Take it out of the oven, leave to cool, liberate from the tin and baking paper, and grate the remaining chocolate squares over to decorate.
13. Serve with the cream, which I think essential, but many disagree.
This post is dedicated to Susi Carrington.
Music to cook to
What else to listen to as you whisk and grind but Bobbie Gentry singing Mississippi Delta and Nina Simone singing Mississippi Goddam.
