June 13th: Hotel Chocolat Mississippi Mud Pie

My adventures with the Hotel Chocolat Summer Peepster Collection continued today with me trying another of their dessert themed offerings - the Mississippi Mud Pie. Doing my background research like I always do, I was informed by WIKI that ...

'Mississippi mud pie is a chocolate-based dessert pie that is likely to have originated in the US state of Mississippi (Duh!!). The treat contains a gooey chocolate filling on top of a crumbly chocolate crust. The name "Mississippi mud pie" comes from the dense cake which resembles the banks of the Mississippi River. It is believed that this dish was created by home cooks after World War II because it was made of simple ingredients that could be found at any supermarket and did not require any special cooking tools' .... isn't that fascinating :D :D

Though the recipe may have originally hailed from the States this hasn't stopped Hotel Chocolat serving up their own version of this chocolatey treat in their own unique form. This chocolate slab variation of the dessert came billed as 'solid milk and white chocolate, decorated with chocolate biscuits and dark chocolate'.

No surprises what size this one came in - 100.0g!! It came packaged inside the standard cellophane packet (should be foil I think!) and looked attractive on the eye with the swirled appearance of the differently toned chocolates creating an exciting visual sight to behold. Upon breaking open the seal to the wrapper, forthcoming scents of chocolate and sweet honey biscuits could be detected - I wasn't going to hang around getting to work on this one.

With my handy taste assistants in attendance I put my bulging, manly biceps *ahem* in to action and went about the task of splitting the slab in to smaller mouthful sized pieces. Hopefully from my photo above you can determine that the biscuit pieces were proportionately distributed across the slab, and were generously integrated in to both the surface and middle parts of the bar. As you can probably also see from my photo the majority of the slab was comprised of milk chocolate - Hotel Chocolat's 40% recipe to be accurate. I've described this chocolate countless times beforehand, rest assured all the usual cream based cocoa flavours were on offer here, and they were delivered with the usual flavour layerings of milk, butter and honey - Yum! The aforementioned biscuit pieces proved to not only be enhancing visually but also rather damn tasty, with one of my work colleagues hitting the nail on the head describing them as 'oreo-like' in taste. From a personal point of my view, I though the best parts of this slab were where the white and milk chocolates were intertwined, as the white chocolate brought further flavour depths of vanilla noted dairy cream to the party. As you can imagine there was a great scramble for the pieces that included the white chocolate, milk chocolate and cookie pieces in one. My only slight disappointment was that the dark chocolate seemed more there for decorative purposes rather than to enhance the taste a great deal.

Overall I was always confident I was going to enjoy this slab given that it was a pretty pure chocolate offering and not one that contained any outlandish enhancing flavours. I always think it is a sensible thing that Hotel Chocolat choose to put a plainer slab amongst their Peepster Selections. Don't get me wrong I love the fact that have more variable chocolates such as the Eton Mess (See - HERE), however at the end of the day I think its wise that they at least have one offering in a selection that sticks to their core principles of simple great tasting chocolate. This Mississippi Mud Pie slab fulfilled this role superbly and combined their staple milk chocolate recipe with the white chocolate and biscuit pieces to create something that was simple yet utterly delicious. This was a slab that was well liked by all that tried it, and it was hoovered up by myself and fellow taste testers in a matter of minutes after its opening. Whether it be as part of this Peepster Selection or in it's own large sized grand slab form, I can recommend this one with a great deal of confidence.

8.9 out of 10