Making a Birthday Cake Pie

My husband brought a copy of The Book on Pie home from the library. To which I responded "YOU CAN BORROW COOKBOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY!?!??!" While I love the library, I'm not sold on cooking from books from the library. I feel like that's asking for a book to be destroyed with flour, sugar, and liquids.

Luckily, he got me the book for Mother's day so I didn't have to worry about destroying the library's copy when I made this pie for my birthday last month.

"Woah, woah, Carin!" you're saying. "You've made pies before, I've seen your twitter feed." To which I say, yes, but I've never made this pie before. Just because I've made/done something before doesn't make it any less scary to do a new variation of that thing. I'm a little more confident, but I have also failed miserably at making pies.

So I jumped in with the traditional "I have no idea what I'm doing!"

The crust

In the past, my crumb crusts have been too dry and haven't stuck together. I'm always wary of adding too much liquid though. But apparently, with crumb crusts (or at least this one), you can add a tablespoon of melted butter at a time until it's the right consistency.

And what is the right consistency you ask? Well, I went with a wet sand-like consistency. And as a bonus I got to make a sand castle before I made the pie crust! Then I got to smash it. Very satisfying, highly encouraged.

I ran into some cracking issues with my pie crust, but it was wet enough that I could push the bits back together, and voila! No more cracks!

A nifty trick for getting your crumb crust even? Put another pie crust tin on top - tin, crust, tin - and then push down. It works better if the tins are similar sized. As I have giant pie tin, I used my hand and a spatula. It worked, but the crust was a little uneven.

The filling

One of the things that I hate about recipes is how qualitative things can be sometimes. For example, this recipe called for the egg whites to be whipped to medium peaks. I've made meringues before so I know stiff peaks when I see them, but WTF are medium peaks?

These. These are apparently medium peaks (or close enough). Stiff-ish, but still a bit wiggly.

"Medium"was too much of a subjective term for me. The recipe did offer up a time frame saying it should take 3-5 minutes to get to the right consistency, but at 5 minutes I still had something closer to soup.

This may be what trips a lot of inexperienced bakers up. Just because there's a time frame on something, doesn't mean it's right. If something doesn't look done yet, it probably isn't. Keep going, but—and this is key—keep a constant eye on it.

Baking is a science and cookbooks are made under "ideal" conditions. Maybe your kitchen is hotter, or humid-er, or at a higher elevation. Even the best recipe may require you to make a guess as to if you've accomplished what the recipe is asking you to do

If I had stopped whipping at 5 minutes and used those eggs would it have worked? Yes. But with less air it wouldn't have risen as much as it did, so it would have been really dense. This wouldn't have "ruined" the pie. It'd still be delicious, it just might look funny. And as Mary Ault always said, "It's not what it looks like, it's how it tastes that matters."

Full disclosure: Mary Ault was my mom and she made some things that looked and tasted gross. But she never let that stop her from trying new things and neither should you.

Right, back to the recipe...

The meringue gets folded in with the a standard batter of flour, sugar, egg yolks, flavoring, and cream and then we add sprinkles. Because sprinkles.

Then the whole thing gets poured into the crust and baked. Easy as, well, pie. Right?

Actually yeah. This was easier than I expected. The hardest part was getting that meringue correct, but I think I nailed it. But not in the Netflix sense.

Fly or flop?

I'm giving myself a fly on this, but with some caveats. First off it tasted ah-mazing. I was nervous because the recipe called for almond flavoring and I'm not a fan of almond flavoring, but it made this pie. Like "it-tasted-exactly-like-boxed-cake-mix" made it.

Secondly, I only had regular jimmies to use for sprinkles. I ended up with a few jimmies on top and a layer of jimmies on the bottom so the traditional birthday cake confetti look was missing. Also, the jimmies bled a little bit. Not as much as nonpareils would have, but a little. Next time I'll use these confetti sprinkles from Sweets & Treats. They'll stay suspended in the custard better.

And finally, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product and then it got eaten super fast. (I did mention it was delicious, didn't I?) So you'll have to take my word that it looked good. I'd say next time, but I've made two batches of my Apple Mail cookies with the goal of taking pictures for a new blog post and have yet to actually get any pictures. I think some things were just meant to be made and enjoyed.

Til next month; take chances, make mistakes, get messy!Carin

When you get stuck on something, look it up. People have been around for thousands of years, you are not the first person to fold in a meringue. It's OK to ask for help. Somebody, somewhere has done what you are doing and documented it on the internet.

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