“Gala” Grasshopper Pie

Author Notes

The combo of mint and chocolate is one of my all-time faves and has been since childhood, when a single, generous scoop of Baskin Robbins’ mint chocolate chip ice cream atop a sugar cone was my everything. Thus, not surprisingly, every spring it is the green-tinted, mint-chocolate sweets—often with the word “grasshopper” in their description—that I am drawn to developing and eating. And this year is no different: Despite the tumultuous, difficult state of our world, a minty-fresh and deeply chocolatey grasshopper pie has emerged from my kitchen—and I’m hoping it will do so from yours, too, sometime soon . . .

My grasshopper pie is actually a riff on a traditional one, which has a chiffon filling, flavored with green crème de menthe and white crème de cacao—the two liqueurs called for in a grasshopper cocktail, the pie’s original inspo—and set with gelatin. It was my pal, Kathy, a grandmother who lives outside of Milwaukee, who first introduced me to the original recipe. Kathy and I began an online correspondence about two years ago, after she read an article about me in her local paper (I was on a Midwest book tour at the time, for my second cookbook, The Vintage Baker).

In the article, I talked about my love of nostalgic sweets and treats; a love that Kathy not only shares with me, but one that is evidenced by her impressive recipe collection. The recipes are written out—either on proper recipe cards, complete with a drawing of a pot-bellied stove and a cat, or on slips of scrap paper—and Kathy would always lay them out on her brown, tightly knit wall-to-wall carpet before painstakingly photographing them and emailing them to me. In these emails, she often shares stories connected to the recipes, too. For instance, it was Kathy’s friend, Jan Beidel, who deserves the credit for the “gala” pie that inspired my own. Kathy and Jan were next-door neighbors in the 1970s. Jan was an exceptionally good time and a fabulous hostess: She was always throwing “galas” and entertaining up a storm. So much so in fact, that when Jan shared her grasshopper pie recipe with Kathy, she called it a “gala” pie in reference to all the special occasions in which it had been enjoyed.

Though both Kathy’s (okay, Jan’s) recipe and mine call for a chocolate cookie crust, I chose to go in a different filling direction, as I wasn’t confident that many folks have even a dusty half-bottle of either crème de menthe or cacao hidden in the back of their kitchen cabinet. Moreover, a chiffon filling seemed ill advised, as I know some have found it difficult to find eggs. Not to mention the fact that making such a filling and working with gelatin is just a tad trickier than how I’m rolling in the kitchen these days.

My filling is no-bake, and the mixture (just heavy cream, cream cheese, sugar, flavoring, and a bit of food coloring) comes together in minutes in a stand mixer. After folding in coarsely chopped, bittersweet chocolate, the whole delicious, pale-green mess is transferred to an Oreo cookie crust flavored with mint extract. I like to top the pie with some minty chocolate whipped cream—but feel free to skip the topping if you want your pie a tad simpler.

To date, Kathy has inspired my recipe for cream cheese-stuffed French toast and peanut butter chocolate Rice Krispies balls, and I’m still planning on making her sugared pecans, peanut butter and chocolate “striped” pie, black-bottomed cupcakes, silhouette parfait pie, and Texas delight pecan pudding refrigerator cake. But for early summer—especially this summer—an easy-peasy, minty-green chocolate “gala” of a pie hits the spot beautifully. —Jessie Sheehan