Easter Dessert

Dad requested I make Texas Trash Pie as the interest on his coupon since it took so long for me to redeem it. I thought that was a pretty good idea. 

I ended up baking it in the pre-baked pie crust I had planned to use for the French silk pie. I made a graham cracker crust for the French silk pie instead. Not sure why I switched, I think a graham cracker crust is more of a crowd pleaser than the standard pie crust, but maybe that's just my family. 

I wanted to use our green ceramic pie plate for the French silk pie, so I took the pie crust out of it and put it in a regular aluminum pie tin. It wasn't quite the same size, but close enough. 

The filling for this recipe is huge and I worried that it would be too much for the crust. It's so gooey with the sweetened condensed milk, chocolate, and caramel, that I thought it would bubble up and over and make a huge mess of my oven. 

So, I didn't put all the filling in, just enough to fill the crust. Then, I made a second crust out of pretzels (no graham crackers left) for the leftovers.

As you can see, it didn't smooth out like I thought it would. 

I baked it on an aluminum cookie sheet (in case of overflow) with another sheet above it so the crust wouldn't burn. That probably impacted the bake. As it was, the filling stayed lumpy and never filled in the cracks like I'd hoped. 

My second pie with the pretzel crust also flopped. The crust never came together! It stayed soft and loose even though I added extra butter and a few tablespoons of sugar to help it combine. The filling never spread out in that one either, so I ended up scooping the pretzel crust filling into the cracks of the regular pie crust. Trash is definitely an accurate description. 😂 I think it'll taste good though. 

What to do with the pretzel crust now? I had one brick of cream cheese left in the fridge, so I made a quick cheesecake. Since the crust never came together, I decided to do a bake to cheesecake instead of a quick refrigerator one. I had leftover caramel bits from the trash pie, so that made it easy to decide on a caramel cheesecake. I put a layer of caramel directly on the crust hoping that the caramel would help it hold together. There might be way too much caramel on the cheesecake, but it looks pretty tasty!