#fail pie

[gianluc30]

[msbarrows]

Fail Pie Rescued \o/

The pie froze well; the chocolate cream part has ended up with a texture somewhere between ice cream and fudge, still soft enough to cut but holding together well instead of slumping. And the sweetness seems to have gone down a little as a side-effect of the freezing. So it will be eaten instead of going out with the compostables tomorrow morning.

[msbarrows]

Dammit, pie :(

Ugh. I made a fail pie today. It was basically “anything that can go wrong, will”.

I’d made a pork pie the other day and had enough pie dough leftover for a single crust, and found myself remembering a recipe for ginger cream pie that I made several times back in my teens and loved. Dug out the old cookbook and looked it up, and spotted that there was also a chocolate cream pie that I can’t remember ever trying, and decided to make that instead. Possibly the first bad decision of a whole chain of them!

Error #1 - Let the pie dough come to room temp, rolled out and shaped the crust, pricked it all over with a fork.... forgot to re-chill it before baking it, so the sides slumped instead of remaining in place, leaving them only half the height of the deep 9″ pie dish. Argh.

Error #2 - Somehow missed the step of cooking the sugar-cornstarch-cocoa-milk mixture until well thickened, before cooking, covered, for an additional 15 minutes with occasional stirring, so the milk mixture was understandably pretty runny when I hit the next step. Sadly I didn’t clue into the missed step until many hours later, when I was trying to figure out where everything had gone so irredeemably wrong.

Error #3 - Beat three eggs yolks with more sugar, stir some of the hot mixture in, then add to the hot mixture. Think there was two small errors here, actually - I think I stirred in too much of the hot mixture, so instead of merely raising the temperature of the beaten eggs it started to cook them. More-or-less dumped all of the egg mix in at once, then stirred, instead of stirring while adding gradually. Also, once I added the eggs to the hot mixture, I think I overstirred.

Error #4 - a continuation of #2, really - even after continuing cooking for rather longer than the 10 minutes the recipe specified, the mix was still on the runny side. Instead of continuing to cook until it was the specified “very thick” I removed it from the heat and started it cooling, thinking it would thicken more as it cooled. A couple hours later it was still very runny. Returned it to double boiler, and after a much longer period of cooking and the addition of more cornstarch it eventually got “very thick” - about like a half-set chocolate pudding. Stuck it back in the fridge, cooled it again.

Error #5 - Once it was mostly cool it still hadn’t noticeably gelled any further. Went ahead and poured it into the baked shell anyway. Made meringue out of the egg whites; don’t think I whipped them enough both before and after adding he sugar, it was still at more of a soft peak than a stiff peak stage when I spread it on the pie and baked it.

Error #6 - After many hours of cooling in the fridge I sliced up the pie and tried to remove a slice. The chocolate cream part is still basically pudding, so much slumpage occured. Tasted good, though much sweeter than I tend to like these days. Stuck the rest of the pie in the freezer; I know meringue doesn’t freeze particularly well, but the pie may be salvageable as a frozen chocolate cream pie. And if it’s not... well, garbage day is Tuesday and it can go out with the rest of the compostables :|

[grim-adventures58]

So I made two pies

I made a pumpkin one but it was a fail pie. I forgot the eggs and my mom had to fix it.

I alos made a peach one and it turned out fine. My mom made the apple pie.

[mekonekou]

I can follow written directions...most of the time.

Handwriting challenge of the day: Write in black ink. All capitals.

I just realized, what I wrote was NOT in all capitals. orz

And this pie looks like the dumpy sofa no one wants unless they're desperate for furniture in their apartment or tired of sitting on milk crates as chairs all the time. 

I didn't bother reading half the instructions on the pie crust box, mainly because my thoughts were, "Well it's just a pie crust, how hard can it be? Just put the damned thing in, crimp the edges fill it up and crimp again...I think. Whatever."

I didn't realize I was supposed to cut off the excess edges of the bottom layer. Until I decided to look at the instructions and by then it was too late. I already stuck the second layer on.

This happens whenever I am not focused on the thing at hand. I am more concerned about getting this manuscript, lab report, and this essay done by Monday. What am I drinking? Chamomile tea. Then coffee shortly after. Oh I have such good sleeping habits. /LIESSSSS