Culinary Adventures: Gluten Free S'mores Brownie Pie

Cooking can be fun, but it can also be a lot of work, and take a lot of time.  In the end, I like for my efforts to be rewarded with an actual meal.  Thus, I almost always cook dinner entrees.  I'll occasionally try making a side dish or an appetizer. I very rarely attempt baking or desserts (with the notable exception of creme brulee, which I've made 3 times now.)

Then, Husband and I invited guests over for dinner. Not only were these our first dinner guests since we got married, these were our first guests period.  It felt like a significant moment, and I wanted to make a special effort.  I had seen a recipe on Pinterest for S'mores Brownie Pie from Sally's Baking Addiction, and decided to mark the occasion by making a gluten-free version.

This is the image that caught my eye on Pinterest.

Since this was a new recipe for me, I (wisely) decided to give it a trial run before making it for guests. The photos below are of the practice pie I made the Tuesday before our Saturday night dinner party. (Alas, I forgot to take photos the second time around.)

The website suggested that you make your own graham cracker pie with melted butter, sugar, and crushed graham crackers.  I followed the instructions, except that I used Gluten Free Graham Style Crumbs by Kinnikinnick instead of crushing regular graham crackers.

My gluten-free graham cracker crust.

So far, so good.

The next step was to make brownie batter and pour it into the pie crust.  The website encourages you to make the brownie mix from scratch, but I really didn't feel up to the challenge, so I used Namaste Foods Gluten Free Brownie Mix.

The pie, before I put it in the oven for the first time.

I baked the brownie mix and the graham cracker crust in the oven, as instructed. Then, I added in an extra step.  S'mores made around a campfire involve lots of lovely, messy, melted chocolate.  I wanted my pie to have something of the texture and flavor of a melted chocolate bar (as opposed to only the chocolate brownie temperature), so I took the pie out of the oven a little early, spread chocolate chips across the top, and put it back in the oven to melt the chocolate chips.

My pie, heading back into the oven for the melting of the chocolate chips.

I had envisioned the melted chocolate chips looking something like Cadbury's Chocolate Spread on top of the pie, but even after five minutes in the oven, the chips remained stubbornly chip-like.  I didn't want to bake the brownie and the pie crust for too long, so I moved on to the next step: adding the marshmallows to the top of the pie.

When I sent Husband to the grocery store for ingredients, I told him to get the "largest size of marshmallows" that he could find.  What I meant was the largest size bag of regular sized marshmallows--but how was he to know that?  It's not what I told him, after all.  If you needed another example of why it is important to write and speak clearly and with good grammar, here it is.

And so I came to discover that there is a size of marshmallow larger than large. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: jumbo size marshmallows exist, and they are three or four times the size of regular marshmallows.

Behold, an instructive marshmallow picture for your edification.  Photo credit: House of Hepworths.

And thus I covered the top of my pie with gargantuan marshmallows. Happily, the chocolate chips were melted enough to help hold them in place. 

My Pie + Gargantuan Marshmallows

The last step was to toast the marshmallows by melting them in the oven for 3 minutes, and then sticking them under the broiler for 1 minute.

Here is what the finished product is supposed to look like, according to Sally's Baking Addiction:

Here is what my pie looked like:

Looks like it's time to sing our favorite song...

One second everything was fine.  Then suddenly the oven was full of fire. I'm blaming the gargantuan sized marshmallows--by the time the bottoms of the marshmallows looked like they were melted, the tops were ready to burst into flame.  I had actually already turned off the oven when the fire started because I was getting ready to take the pie out.

Despite everything, the pie was really tasty, especially after it had cooled off.  Husband and I  made the mistake of trying to eat it while it was fresh out of the oven, and almost entered diabetic comas.  After it had cooled off, the sugar was somehow less intense.

I made a second pie for our dinner guests, with greater success--and no fire!  I baked the crust and the brownie layer ahead of time (first thing that morning), and added the marshmallow layer just before I served it.  The only difficulty we ran into was that the melted marshmallows were impossible to cut through, possibly because I completely ignored the instructions to "allow it to cool to room temperature before slicing."

Other notes on my 1st pie versus my 2nd Pie (of which there are no photos):

• The original recipe for the crust called for 12 crushed graham crackers (approximately 1.5 cups of crumbs), 6 tablespoons of melted butter, and 1/3 cup of sugar. Because my first pie was so sugary, the second time around I substituted an extra 1/2 cup of crumbs for the 1/3 cup of sugar, which worked perfectly.  I'm planning to do the same thing next time I need a gluten-free pie crust, perhaps for a pumpkin pie.
• The melted chocolate chips didn't add the flavor or texture to the pie that I was hoping for, so I didn't add them to the second pie.  Any resulting difference in taste didn't register with me, but it did make it more difficult to stop the marshmallows from rolling off the top of the pie.
• I used regular marshmallows, instead of jumbo marshmallows, for the second pie, with great results.
• One of the reasons that the website gave for making the brownie from scratch instead of from a mix was that a mix would make too much brownie for the pie.  This was indeed the case.  The package gave one set of instructions for using the entire bag of mix, and another for using only half the bag, but even half the bag was still too much brownie for my pie. For the first pie, I thought, so what?  I'll make a quarter of the bag.  But making half the bag required one egg, so a quarter of a bag would require half of an egg....which was annoying.  The second time around, I made half the bag, and poured the extra mix into a second pie pan. 
• A note about the Namaste Foods Gluten Free Brownie Mix: this mix makes REALLY rich brownies--so rich that I added milk to it the second time around, and it barely made a difference.