Marbled Chocolate Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin pie is an all-time holiday dessert classic, but maybe it’s time for a glow up. For Thanksgiving this year, Cookdap challenged 5 of our favorite bakers to upgrade our basic pumpkin pie recipe. The rules? The base ingredients needed to stay the same, and the bakers could only use five additional ingredients for their upgrade. Check out the rest of the pumpkin pie recipes from our challenge, here.

When it comes to holiday baking and I'm short on time or kitchen space, I'm always drawn to pumpkin pie. With pumpkin pie, I don't have to pre-cook any ingredients (like sweet potatoes!) or even peel and slice ingredients (apple pie, I'm looking at you!). Instead, I can whip one together in minutes with a store-bought pie shell, canned pumpkin puree, sweetened condensed milk, eggs, and a pumpkin spice blend.

But even tried-and-trued holiday favorites can use a little updating, which is what this chocolatey twist on pumpkin pie is! I first discovered the happy union of chocolate and pumpkin when I swirled some chocolate into my favorite pumpkin loaf recipe. The combination was a revelation: The rich dark chocolate added depth to the autumnal pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavors. Hence, the inspiration for adding a marbled chocolate twist to this pumpkin pie recipe.

To keep this recipe simple, I melted dark chocolate and stirred it into some of the pie filling. I wanted something visually appealing (hence, the marbling) and that still looked and tasted like pumpkin pie (just with a chocolatey upgrade). Since melted chocolate can be heavy, I added an extra egg for lightness.

A word on the chocolate: When developing this recipe, I used 85% cacao dark chocolate. You can use whatever cacao percentage you'd like — just remember the higher the percentage of cacao, the less sweet it is. More important is that the chocolate is good quality chocolate, which will melt easily and incorporate into the pie filling (look for no additives and a higher percentage of cocoa butter than the cheap stuff).