What Happens to a Dream Deferred

Those of you who spoke to me at any point in April of 2007 probably recall my temporary obsession (and I do not use the word "obsession" lightly) with candy pie. Tiffany and I got together while I was at that emotionally scarring conference on torture and human rights at Northwestern and went to Kafein, where they had "candy pie" on the menu and listed chocolate chip cookie dough, caramel apple suckers, different candy bars, and a couple other things. And I was like, "I'll have the candy pie with everything, please!" and the waitress was like, "you have to pick a flavor" and I realized that you could not have the candy pie equivalent of mulligan stew, because it hadn't been invented yet. (Clearly, I was not too stressed about it. I got the chocolate chip cookie dough pie and there's a picture where I look like I might pee my pants because I'm so excited about it.)

So on Friday, David and I were looking at menus and I saw "fruit pie," and I started waxing poetic about candy pie and kind of wouldn't shut up about it for the next twelve hours, and was like, "I'm totally going to make it for dinner tomorrow. I am going to make candy pie."

AND I DID. I can never give anyone the recipe, because there is no recipe, and I literally just wandered down the candy aisle at Sainsbury's being like, "YES PLEASE" and throwing stuff into my basket. The closest we came was a post-it note where we wrote: "pie crust," "dough," "candy," and "awesomeness," and then drew a picture of a pie. But basically, you buy a pie crust, chop up about a billion miniature Mars, Milky Ways, Snickers, Malteasers, Galaxies, truffles, and caramels, and throw in a bar and a half of dark chocolate and then put them in a bowl in a bath of piping hot water and stir it until it all melts with chunks of candy in it. And then whisk instant pudding powder with a half pint of milk, mix that into the chocolate lava until it's sort of fluffy, and pour it all into the pie crust and refrigerate it for like fifteen minutes before smashing up digestives and crumbling them all over the top. I think you could probably reheat it without it liquifying again, but I'm not a scientist, so we played it safe and left it in the fridge for like two hours before eating it with ice cream. The best part is that you can use virtually any kind of candy, although I think it's good to mix it up and use stuff with soft fillings like caramel and nougat and peanuts inside it to give it texture and keep it from turning into a block of crusty chocolate when it reconstitutes. (We ruled out Skittles and gum when we were picking out candy, but otherwise it's all fair game.)






(I hadn't realized this until today, but Tiffany and I basically like to rendezvous on different continents to eat novelty junk food together. It is excellent. And now if she visits England, I can make her candy pie. I also tried to tell everyone at dinner that it was healthy because I used 1% milk instead of 2% milk, but everyone sees through that pretty quickly. And I would post pictures of the finished product when it was sliced open and gooey, but five of us may or may not have eaten the whole pie before I remembered to do that.)