Chocolate Angel Pie

Like so many of my favorite recipes, this one comes from an old book of clippings collected by mother and grandmother. I don’t recall either of them ever making this pie, but they both loved anything with meringue and nuts (like the Luby’s Butternut Brownie Pie) so it makes sense they’d save this one. It’s called Chocolate Angel Pie, and it’s similar to French Silk Pie, but a bit lighter and with more varied textures.

The crust is what makes this pie special. It’s a flaky sweet meringue flecked with toasted nuts. This particular recipe is for an 8 inch pie pan and calls for 2 egg whites. If you can’t find a small enough pie pan you can just double the crust and use as much as you need to cover the sides.

Here’s a picture of what the meringue crust (which is more of a nest) looked like before I put it in the oven. I didn’t double or scale up the recipe at all and a small disposable pie pan worked fine.

The recipe is pretty easy, and you can mix and match the nuts and chocolate. This original calls for German’s Sweet Chocolate, which is still readily available and usually purchased for German Chocolate Cake. Trader Joe’s Dark works just fine. The recipe also calls for either 1 cup of cream, whipped or 1 cup of non-dairy whipped topping.  That’s a little confusing because 1 cup of heavy cream whips into about 2 cups of whipped cream which would be more than 1 cup of already whipped topping. In the end, I don’t think it matters much. I whipped a full 8 oz carton of cream, added 2 tablespoons of confectioners’ sugar and folded it in with the chocolate.

Next time I make this I’m going to skip the pie pan and just make round nests of meringue on parchment, then put a big dollop of filling in the center of each and garnish with more cream and berries.