Pastel de Chocolate con crema mexicana is the full name of the cake in Spanish, the colloquial language in Mexico. The dark chocolate in this cake is flavored with a pinch of chilli, a wonderful combination of extremes that you will undoubtedly come to appreciate. We owe this taste sensation to the Aztecs, the first people who prepared a drink from chocolate and spiced it with chili pepper. In addition, coffee extract is processed in the Mexican chocolate cream cake, which makes this creation an excellent dessert cake. Chocolate lovers, at work!
Sweet, spicy and creamy
Chocolate cake, we can’t get enough! We have tried many chocolate cake recipes and there is always a cake that is even better than all the others! This is one of them, the daring combination of sweet, spicy and creamy makes this cake a special specialty that tickles your taste buds in a way you never knew before.
The crust of this pie is made with graham crackers, a crunchy biscuit commonly used in cheesecakes in the United States and produced in Mexico by food giant Nabisco. We do not know the Graham crackers here, instead of this crispy biscuit we can use Verkade Digestive Original biscuits, which is a good alternative.
Recipe for Mexican chocolate cream pie
If you are not so fond of the coffee taste in a cake, simply leave the coffee out, you can also replace it with coffee liqueur.
Ingredients for the crust:
- 300 grams of Verkade Digestive Original biscuits
- 50 grams of melted butter
- 30 grams of sugar
- white of 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
- pinch of salt
Ingredients for the filling:
- 100 grams of sugar
- 30 grams of cornstarch
- 20 grams of cocoa
- 20 ml of coffee extract
- 1 egg
- 2 egg yolks
- pinch of chili pepper
- pinch of salt
- 400 ml of whole milk
- 60 grams of dark chocolate
- 50 grams of icing sugar
- 400 ml of whipped cream
Preparation of the crust
- Preheat the oven to 190 ° Celsius,
- melt the butter over low heat,
- crumble the Verkade Digestive biscuits in the food processor into coarse crumbs,
- keep two tablespoons of crumbs for garnish,
- put the remaining crumbs in a mixing bowl and add the sugar, cinnamon and salt and stir well together,
- split the eggs and set the egg yolks aside for a while, we use them in the filling,
- add the egg white and melted butter to the cookie crumb mixture and work it through well,
- grease a cake tin with butter, add the crumb mixture and press it well on the bottom and against the edges,
- bake the pie crust for 9 to 10 minutes at 190 ° Celsius until it starts to color, then let the crust cool completely.
Preparation of the filling:
- Make a cup of good strong coffee and take 20 ml of this extract to use in the filling,
- put the sugar in a mixing bowl and add cornstarch, cocoa, coffee extract, the egg and the egg yolks,
- stir everything together well and add the salt and chili pepper, beat well until a smooth mixture is formed,
- put the milk in a saucepan and heat over medium heat to boiling point, do not boil,
- take a cup of the milk, add it to the egg mixture while stirring,
- then add little by little the egg-milk mixture to the rest of the hot milk, stirring constantly,
- keep the mixture boiling over medium heat, keep stirring for about 10 minutes until thick,
- make sure it doesn’t boil because then the eggs will curdle,
- remove the mixture from the heat, add the chocolate and stir until the chocolate is completely melted,
- now put the pan in a container of ice water until the mixture has cooled, stirring occasionally.
Composing the cake:
- Scoop the chocolate filling into the crust and cover the surface with cling film to prevent crusting,
- put the cake in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 hours so that the filling can stiffen, then remove the foil,
- beat the whipped cream with the icing sugar until stiff, spread the cream over the cake,
- garnish the cake with the remaining cookie crumbs, done!
If you want to be able to serve the cake a day later, use a bag of Dr. Oetker beats in the whipped cream.
Chili pepper is a very spicy type of pepper, so do not use more than a pinch of it to season this cake, if you still find the result not spicy enough, you can always sprinkle a little bit over the cream, but make sure it does not dominate, the point is to give the chocolate a “bite”, it is not supposed to be a savory cake!
Chili pepper, one of the oldest known agricultural crops in the world
In all likelihood, chili pepper was used in Mexico as early as around 7000 BC, making it one of the oldest known agricultural crops in the world. Chili pepper belongs to the genus Capsicum of the nightshade family.
It is the capsaicin in the pepper that gives the pepper the sharp taste, the amount of capsaicin determines the final sharpness of a chili pepper, so a scale for chili peppers has been devised to give a value to the sharpness: the Scoville scale. Christopher Columbus brought the plant to Europe, well before then the Aztecs had already cultivated dozens of varieties. Today the plants are used worldwide and new varieties are still being developed.
