Watching a food blogger in person is a real treat. There’s nothing quite like that confrontation of your imagined persona you supply from their blog, coming face to face with the real thing.
I had this opportunity to meet up with Eggbeater on her current visit to Portland, a whirlwind tour of classes and berry picking. Watching Shuna in her element, sharing with us her thoughts on what she loves to do: create great tasting desserts, makes her blog resonate even more for me.
Friday was Shuna’s Portland pie crust class, offered just around the corner from my new home!
A self described Fruit Forward inspired pastry chef, Shuna’s inspirations gave me a nice shake up to my caked and chocolate centric sweet tooth. Our class finished off with a sampling of marionberries, blackberries, boysenberries and blueberries. The subtleties of flavor that played across them all was startling. The tartness of the blackberries set up the soft sweetness of my boysenberry, swirling with vanilla like aromas. The mildly tart blueberries had a sweet aftertaste that tricked my brain into thinking it had just eaten candy.
I baked up the pie crust from Shuna’s class and filled it full of Sweet’s current craving for coconut cream pie, but with a twist: a foundation layer of soft bittersweet chocolate ganache studded with fresh raspberries supported the coconut filling.
A bite of this pie offers the initial hit of creamy coconut with a short burst of bright raspberry followed by the chocolate and coconut running off together holding hands into the sunset. The raspberry in particular picks up the pie’s flavors and gives it a higher note making this pie now reminiscent of a coconut candy. I highly recommend this flavor experiment. I made our pie with only half of it containing raspberries, and found myself wishing for more raspberries.
Coconut Cream Pie with Raspberries and Chocolate Procedure:
- blind bake an empty pie crust
- let cool
- pour in a 1 cm layer of ganache
- stud with rapsberries
- let cool
- cook coconut filling
- let cool slightly and then pour over the raspberry chocolate layer
- let cool overnight
- top with gelatin stabilized whipped cream and toasted coconut before serving
5 Comments
Oh, my. That looks amazingly decadent.
Mmmm! Or you could take another bite of dinner to counteract the sweet richness of the pie, then another bite of pie, then dinner, then pie… 
Joanna, Lizzy & I spoke of this pie last night. They asked me how it tasted… Well, I said, It LOOKS like it tasted amazing!
I do so hope I get to taste some for meself!
Thanks for coming to the class, the links & your great words here. I love teaching and I’m glad it comes through.
Oh dear, we were completely selfish with this pie. And I had such good intentions of sharing too. Whoops.
I guess that’s what the next one will be for!–McAuliflower
Wow. Many of the blog posts I like the most are about fellow food bloggers getting together, meeting and cooking. Thanks for sharing your experience here, as the pie looks absolutely to die for. I don’t usually like coconut pies (even though i like coconut? weird, huh) but this seems to be balanced really well with the raspberry and chocolate surprises at the bottom. Nice work Shuna AND McAuliflower!
[...] This was suppose to be a beautifully golden baked pie crust to build my chocolate raspberry coconut cream pie upon. [...]
