Do a Little Dance in That Mississippi Mud

Sometimes, your friends hate the things you love, and vice versa, to the extent where you wonder how you could even be friends with them. This is the case with my friend Emily. She has been mentioned on this blog before as a certifiable health nut, a lover of broccoli, exercise and extra-virgin olive oil. She is also a hater of baked goods! Can you believe it!? We lived together for three years and she ate everything I made, and now that we are living separately she comes out with the truth. For shame.

Thank God she likes ice cream, or it would really be curtains for us. She also loves coffee, so for her birthday I wanted to make her the beautiful espresso cake in Baked Explorations. Then she was all blah blah blah I hate baked goods, so I decided not to waste me time. But she had been requesting that I make some coffee ice cream. And suddenly, the idea for her birthday treat came to me!

This post is actually a double-header. It's the Mississippi Mud Pie recipe (B) from Baked Explorations, made with the coffee ice cream from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. I won't say much about the ice cream, since Rebecca already blogged about it and I have basically the same impressions. The coffee flavor is VERY strong - too strong for a non-coffee drinker like me. In fact, I decided to put it in the pie because I didn't think I would end up finishing it otherwise, and it's a shame to waste ice cream, even ice cream you don't really care for. The pie, on the other hand, was awesome. On balance, I think the coffee ended up going well with the sweeter, ever-so-slightly-alcoholic chocolate flavors, with neither one overpowering the other, and the nuts were just tasty extras, giving it additional taste and texture. I was not already in possession of bourbon, not being an elderly Southern gentleman, so I bought the cutest little bottle of bourbon there ever was. The whole thing was probably four tablespoons. So adorable. This was a big hit at Emily's birthday celebration and I would totally make it again, but to be honest I'd probably use my coffee ice cream of choice, which is Starbucks brand. Yummmm.

You can find the recipe here. Plus, they have the same bowls as me so there's an additional layer of authenticity.