When I moved to Portland I was welcomed by over 70 microbreweries, a mere 600 different food carts and a few hundred artisan coffee shops. Clearly, I chose the right place to move. But within this fabulous food mecca I was thrown into a subculture I’m sure many of you are familiar with: the ever-hated hipster.

I’m proud to present the best chocolate I found this French Silk Chocolate pie recipe in a New York Times Cookbook, at the bottom of a cabinet full of cookbooks. Its cover in tatters, the binding stiff and the pages yellow the old thick tome yielded this secret that I have kept with me to this day.

The first few times I tried to make it, the silky filling was a little less silky and a little grainier, but I soldiered on. My first truly successful pie was made unconventionally, though it is easy enough to follow the directions and get the proper pie.

That first time was a Christmas holiday many years ago, in a family cabin nestled on the shores of Windermere Lake, a small getaway west of Banff in the Canadian Rockies. The wind was blowing, a light snow was coming down and it felt cold enough to freeze fire.

In the kitchen most of the family was working hard on Christmas dinner, blissfully forgetting that the dessert I was responsible for doesn’t bake but chills, a process that takes hours. As they popped the turkey in the oven and more space opened up they let me get to work, but as everything started wrapping up I was still beating those eggs into the chocolate. As I finished up we had to figure out how to finish the pie or we would be eating it for breakfast.