The Best Chocolate Cream Pie | From Scratch Recipe

Hi, I'm Marie. Welcome to Marie's Kitchen. I'm so glad you're back. Today we are making a chocolate cream pie. This pie is so incredibly delicious with a rich chocolate filling, creamy and silky, and a big cloud of sweetened whipped cream on top. Really, it doesn't get any better than this. And the best part about this pie is that it is so easy to make. I'll walk you through step by step as usual so you can really build some confidence in your pie making skills and feel so proud to serve this incredible pie at your next Thanksgiving or Christmas table. I can't wait to share it with you. Let's get started. To start, we are gonna make a homemade crust. And as always, if you prefer to buy a store-bought crust, that is perfectly fine. Save time where you can. But if you're interested in learning how to make a homemade crust, I hope you'll watch this demo because you'll see that it really is so easy and is actually faster than going to the store and buying one. And you don't need any equipment at all. We're making this just in a bowl with our own two hands. Now, if you'd rather make this in a food processor or in your KitchenAid stand mixer, I do have tutorials for those. Hop over to my Easy Pie Crust Tutorial, and I'll show you how to make a pie crust in the food processor, stand mixer, and also in a bowl. So everything you need is there. All right, first step, we'll measure out our 1 1⁄4 cup all-purpose flour. And of course, to measure, we'll just scoop up the flour and level it off with a knife. Pop that in our bowl. 1 1⁄4 cup. Level it off into the bowl. Next is one tablespoon sugar and about 1⁄4 teaspoon kosher salt. We'll give that a quick stir here. Next, we'll add 1 1⁄2 cup or eight tablespoons cold unsalted butter. And because we want cold butter, I always leave it in the refrigerator right until ready to use it. I'm gonna grab that now. So here's our butter. Now, we'll cut this into about eight pieces. Does not have to be exact. And then just toss that into our bowl here. Now, the reason you want cold butter is because those little pieces of butter in your dough, when you bake the crust, they'll melt, create a little pocket of space where steam can rise, and that's what creates flakes in your dough. So you always wanna be sure you have some little pieces of butter in, scattered throughout your dough. And to ensure that we do that, we have to keep the butter cold. If the butter was warm, it would just kind of melt into the flour. So that's the whole reason that we're trying to keep the butter cold. That's why we keep it in the refrigerator until we're ready to use it. And then as you'll see, we're not gonna handle it too much, and we're also gonna use cold water. All of these things are designed just to keep the butter cold so we have those little pieces, so we create a flaky crust. Now, what I'm doing here is just squishing the butter with my hands. It's a technical term, squish it. You're just gonna squish and squish and squish. And all we're doing is trying to sort of make some little smaller pieces of butter. All right, this is starting to feel good. We've got some relatively small pieces of butter there, not really any big chunks. And it's just kind of nicely mixed. Still very dry, but starting to get mixed there. So that looks good. Now what we're gonna do is add our five tablespoons cold water. One, two, three, four, five. Then we'll just grab a fork and kind of bring this together, kind of mix everything around. We're just trying to hydrate all that flour. You don't want big pockets of dry flour, so we just kind of move the water around to hydrate a little bit of everything. And I know there's a big thing about not overmixing the dough and I do talk about that a lot, but don't worry about it. It's better actually to have it a little more mixed than have it falling apart dry. So I would always err on the side of a little more mixed rather than undermixed. So if you're not sure, go ahead and just mix it a little more, bring it together a little more. It's better than having a big pocket of dry flour or an undermixed crust, which then can be very hard to work with. So this is looking great. Now, although it does still look very dry, when I take a handful and grab it, it holds together like a pie crust, so we know we're done. And that's it, we've made our pie crust. So I've got some Glad Press'n Seal Saran Wrap works just as well. And a lot of people will tell you to put some flour down, dump your pie crust down on the counter, bring it all together, and that kind of makes a big mess that's unnecessary. So let me show you my hack for avoiding all that. We just grab our Press'n Seal or Saran Wrap, nice big piece here. Put that down on the counter, sticky side up. And then we just take our pie dough and plop it right down. That's another technical term, plop. You just plop it right onto your, your Press'n Seal. You just plop it on there. And then what we're gonna do is just use the corners of the Press'n Seal to bring that together into a disc. It does all the shaping for you. Then you just twist the plastic together up top and kind of shape this into a round disc. And there's your pie crust. All done, we're gonna put this in the refrigerator. It needs to chill for at least 20 minutes, up to an hour is great. Or if you wanna make ahead, you can make this the night before, leave it in the refrigerator overnight. You can make it up to a month or two before and leave it in the freezer. To thaw it from the freezer, you'll just put it in the refrigerator overnight to thaw. So lots of options there for make ahead and I know that's so helpful around the holidays. So I'll pop this in the fridge now. Okay, to roll out the crust, we're gonna start with a little flour here on our countertop. And then we'll just unwrap our dough. Looks great. If you had this in the refrigerator overnight or if you had it, say, in the freezer, if you made it ahead and had it in the freezer and this was feeling very just rock solid ice cold, then you wanna let it warm up on the countertop for about five minutes, maybe 10 minutes, just to become a little bit warmer because a really rock solid crust won't roll out. So let that warm up a bit. But this has only been in the fridge for about 20, 30 minutes. So it is just the right temperature to roll out. I can feel it's kind of pliable, nice and soft. So we're just going to press that down. I like to sort of press that into a circle just using my hands first. And then we're gonna grab our rolling pin, put a little flour on the rolling pin, a little flour on the pie crust, and make sure there's some underneath so it doesn't stick. And now we'll give that a roll. Every time you roll, you wanna then turn it a quarter turn. And the reason really is twofold. The first reason is to make sure it doesn't stick. I've taught a ton of pie classes over the past 15 years. And really the one problem that comes up a lot is having a pie crust stick to your countertop. And when that happens, it is almost impossible to get up in one piece. You have to just ball it up and start over. So to avoid sticking, you always wanna use a little flour underneath. And then also after each roll, give it a turn, a quarter turn. The other reason we turn it a quarter turn is because it helps the pie crust stay in this nice round shape. If you don't turn it, it can often get very lopsided and just sort of long, misshapen. So good to turn it after each roll. And of course, if you do feel it sticking either to your rolling pin or to the countertop, you'll wanna toss a little flour on top or under. Okay, this is looking great. And if you can see up close, we've got lots of big pieces of butter in there. So we know this is gonna be a nice flaky pie crust. So yay, good job to us. Now to move it, well, first we wanna measure. To measure to make sure it's big enough, we just flip our pie plate over onto the pie dough and you make sure you have about two inches around the outside. And that way you know you have enough to go over the bottom, up the side and have a nice decorative edge. So this looks great. To move it, I like to just fold it over and then pick it up, set it, the fold in the center of the pie plate and unfold it. If you happen to have sort of a drier crust, it happens and it cracks, you can sort of bring it back together just with your fingers and a little water, just patch it back together. You'll never see it after it bakes. Now we're gonna just set it inside the pie plate. You don't wanna stretch it. You never wanna stretch pie dough because it'll wanna stretch right back and shrink and so just set it right into the pie plate. Now to create the decorative edge, the first thing that we're gonna do, some people trim the pie crust with scissors. I don't like to do that. I like to use all the dough and have a nice thick edge. So we're gonna leave all the dough on there and we're gonna just fold it under itself and then rest it on the lip of the pie plate there. So fold it under itself and rest it on the lip. Now here is kind of a situation where we have a little bit, not quite as much pie dough as we had over here. So what you can do is find a spot where you have a lot, pinch that off and just go fill it in here and that way you'll have a little bit more there. So it's very forgiving in that way. You can move pie dough around. Okay, now we'll just keep folding it under itself and resting it on the lip of the pie plate. All right, if it gets a little sticky, just use a little flour on your hands. This looks good. Now I just kind of go around and even it out a little bit here. And then to create the fluted edge, what we're gonna do is use my knuckle and two fingers. So you just press the dough between those two and it makes a nice fat fluted edge. Seal up any cracks there. And again, if it gets sticky, just dip your finger in a little flour there or your knuckle. We'll just do two fingers and a knuckle there, all the way around. All right, that looks great. Again, if you've been making pies with me for a while, you know we are not going for perfection here. We're going for a beautiful, homemade, delicious pie. Perfection is not the goal in life or in pie making. At least in my view, imperfections are really what make things beautiful. Okay, there is our pie crust, homemade pie crust, all done. Now what we're gonna do is put this in the freezer. We need to freeze it for about 30 minutes. You want your pie crust really cold before you bake it. And we are blind baking this crust. And what that means is we're baking it without any filling inside. The reason we're baking it without filling is because we're cooking the filling on the stovetop. It's a cold custard filling. And so we need to have the pie crust completely cooked before we add it. And so that's why you blind bake it. For a full tutorial on blind baking, check out my video on blind baking pie crust. But in a nutshell, blind baking is baking a pie crust without any filling in it and I have a hack to show you how to do that that is way easier than using pie weights and parchment paper. So hang on for that. Right now though, what we're gonna do is put it in the freezer for 30 minutes because you want your pie crust really cold. If you put a warm pie crust into a warm oven, it's just gonna melt and it's gonna sink down and sag. So if you have a really nice ice cold crust and you put it in that hot oven, it's gonna hold its shape really well. So let's get this in the freezer. Okay, so I just got the pie crust out of the freezer. It's been freezing for about 30 minutes and it's nice and cold. If you wanted to do something ahead for the holidays, you can certainly make a pie crust, roll it out, put it in your pie plate like this, wrap it in Saran Wrap twice and put it in the freezer and then you can leave it in there for a month, several weeks, whatever. And then when you're ready to blind bake it, you just take it out, unwrap it and it's ready to go. So back to blind baking. Blind baking again is baking a pie crust without the filling. The problem with blind baking is that the edges often will sink in on themselves and you'll see that a lot on cool custard pies like we're making today, the crust is kind of sunken in. And the usual way to avoid that is to put kind of a pseudo filling in the pie. And so the way people do that is they take parchment paper or foil and they fit the parchment inside the pie crust and then what they do is they get beans or pie weights or rice. And then what you do is you pour the beans into the pie crust and these beans or rice or pie weights, whatever you have, will help hold the pie crust in shape. And you push it up against the sides and that holds the pie crust in shape. Now this, you can do this if you like. The problem with this method for me is sometimes I don't have beans or enough beans. You have to have kind of a lot of beans and I don't own pie weights. And then one time I used rice and literally as I was pulling this up, some of the rice slipped into the pie crust and getting rice out of a partially cooked pie crust is extremely difficult. So I vowed that I would never do that again. So this method is not what we're using. Instead, I have a hack and I can't wait to share it with you. What we're gonna do is take a aluminum pie plate. You can find these at the grocery store. Just have a few on hand in your house. Then it has a lip on it. You just wanna kind of fold that lip so it's flat on the sides, fold it up. Then we're gonna press that pie plate into the pie crust like this. And this fits in so perfectly and it helps the pie crust hold its shape. It will stay exactly where it is while blind baking. So for me, that is a huge win. Now I do have the oven preheating to 425 degrees. It's a nice hot oven that's really gonna seal this crust in place. So together with our aluminum disposable pie plate in the center along with the cold crust and the hot oven, that is a recipe for success. Now I do always bake my pies and pie crusts on a cookie sheet. And the reason is really twofold. When you have a pie, sometimes it can overflow and if it overflows into your oven, it's a huge mess to clean up. So save yourself that worry and just bake it on a cookie sheet. The other reason is I have this gorgeous crust here and when I go in to pick it up with my pot holders, it can often break. To avoid all that, just grab the cookie sheet by the sides and you won't have to worry about that. So for blind baking, what we're gonna do is bake it at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes. That will set up the edges of the crust very well. Then we take it out of the oven, pop this out, poke some holes in the bottom so this doesn't bubble up with air bubbles and then we finish baking it for about 15 to 20 minutes until golden all around. So let's pop this in the oven at 425 for about 20 minutes. Now we'll hop over to the stove and start the filling. For the filling, we'll need 1 1⁄4 cup cornstarch. Next is 1 1⁄2 cup white sugar and then 1 1⁄2 teaspoon salt. The cornstarch can be a little lumpy so you really wanna make sure this is mixed together really well. Next is four yolk. So we'll put the four yolks right in with the cornstarch and sugar and give that a whisk. Now we'll add two cups, 2% or whole milk. I'm just gonna pour that right in and whisk this together. You wanna get that real smooth so there's no clumps of egg. Now we'll add one cup, half and half which just adds a little extra richness. So now we'll turn the fire on to about medium and we're gonna keep stirring. You need to bring it to a boil so the cornstarch is activated and it will start thickening the mixture and you'll see it'll get really thick. I'm also gonna pour in about a teaspoon of vanilla extract. We're gonna keep stirring it so we don't want anything like cooked on the bottom. You just wanna heat the whole mixture up together and not have like a layer of cooked custard on the bottom. So keep stirring it as you go. Now here we go, you can see it is starting to boil. You can see some bubbles forming there. See that starting to boil? So we're immediately going to turn that down because we don't wanna curdle it or overcook it. Turn that down to low just to simmer it. And this is just for about one minute we stir it like this. We are gonna turn that off now. Now it's time to add the chocolate. This is seven ounces semi-sweet chocolate. You could use a darker version if you like. We're gonna just pour that right in and whisk it in. And we're also going to add two tablespoons butter. Okay, this looks great. Got this nice thick chocolate pudding filling. That is done. All right, now we have our pie crust that's been blind baked and cooled. And we're gonna go ahead and add our pudding filling right to that. Just pour that hot pudding right in to the pie crust. So nice. Gotta have a little taste. Mm, oh my gosh. Yum. It is so good, that yummy chocolate rich creamy flavor. Next step is to take some wax paper or parchment paper. And what we're gonna do is just take a little piece of butter and grease the front of the wax paper or parchment and this will just prevent it from sticking to the pudding. And what this does is prevents the pudding from creating kind of like a, remember from Seinfeld, the pudding skins, from creating that skin on top as it cools. So this will have a nice smooth top. So we'll just kind of fit this on flush with the pudding here. Press that right on. And that will prevent it from creating a thick skin on top. Now we'll need to chill this thoroughly to let it completely set up and cool enough to put the whipped cream on top. So four to eight hours is great. Again, this is one you can make ahead. You wanna make it the day before Thanksgiving and then just add your whipped cream and enjoy. To make the whipped cream, I am gonna use my KitchenAid stand mixer. You can also use electric beaters if that's easier. We'll start with one cup heavy whipping cream. Into that we'll add one tablespoon sugar and one teaspoon vanilla extract. You can also add a little pinch of salt to kind of round out the flavors. Now we'll beat this on low just until foamy. About a minute. Now we'll increase to high and whip that until soft peaks forms. It takes about one to three minutes. And this looks great. Pull this up. We've got these nice soft peaks there. Look at that, just right. Now we're ready to add the whipped cream to the pie, the moment of truth. I just spread that around and I do like to show a little bit of the chocolate around the outside so you can see what kind of pie it is. Again, we are not going for perfection here. That is not your goal. Your goal is delicious, homemade, comforting, fabulous. Those are our goals when making pies or really anything in the kitchen. What a beauty and it was so easy. Thanks so much for joining us on Marie's Kitchen. Today we made this easy and delicious chocolate cream pie with whipped cream on top and a homemade crust. I really hope you get to try it. If you do, let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you. Also, if you like this video, be sure to give us a thumbs up. We so appreciate your likes and it also means a lot to YouTube. That decides who else sees this video. So if you like it, give it a thumbs up. Also, if you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button. I've got lots more videos coming up with easy recipes just like this and I don't want you to miss any of them. For this recipe and more, check out my website marieseva.com. There you can go and get all my recipes, including this one, print them out, put them in a notebook, and make your very own Marie's Kitchen cookbook for free. My goal is to give you some really easy recipes that turn out great every time so you can build some confidence in the kitchen and feel really inspired to share good food with people that you love. From my kitchen to yours, thank you.