On the baking of pie

[jethrien]

I set out to make a dark chocolate pecan pie last night. I had a new recipe that I'd wanted to try. I also had my mother's recipe for regular pecan pie. They were similar, but the proportions were somewhat different. I decided I would try something in between the two.

I started out with an all-butter crust. Now, I've been experimenting with fats (my basic recipe calls for all shortening). The 2/3 butter, 1/3 shortening came out delightfully stretchy and easy to roll out. (Easy as pie?) Unfortunately, the all butter didn't come out so well. I'm still not sure whether I didn't add enough water or something, and will need further experimenting, but the dough came out on the brittle side. It's the first time I've tried to get a crust into the pan and failed and had to reroll it out in years. So I was behind on my timing already.

One recipe called for 1 cup of corn syrup, the other for a cup and a quarter. But when I poured the corn syrup into the measuring cup, I discovered that I'd seriously overestimated the volume left in the bottle. I had about a quarter cup of corn syrup. Crap.

It was 9:15 at this point, and the pie would take 50 minutes to bake and I wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time. So I didn't just leave to go get more corn syrup.

I though of something clever - pancake syrup is essentially corn syrup, with a little maple flavoring added. Maple and pecans would go just fine together. I grabbed the pancake syrup and dumped that in the measuring cup.

I had a quarter cup of that, too.

So I tried to get creative. I boiled down a brown sugar and water mixture, and stirred in cornstarch to thicken it. It did indeed thicken, but by the time it had boiled down, I had less than a quarter cup of that.

Finally, I remembered I had molasses hidden in the back of the cabinet. I topped it all out with the molasses.

So this is going to be more like a cross between shoofly pie and chocolate pecan pie. Should be interesting.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Then you stick to the recipe, and remember that you're in a kitchen and not a lab. As long as you remember to cook your chicken and shellfish all the way through, don't add mushrooms you found growing in the park, and don't try to substitute drain cleaner for gravy, I doubt you'll kill anyone. If the sauce is watery or the souffle falls, you shrug and say "oops". It'll probably still be edible, if you made it out of food.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It'll probably still be edible, if you made it out of food.

What if it's made out of people?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Meh, still edible.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

soylent green?