Like an idiot, I volunteered to bring a banana cream pie to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Of all the desserts in my admittedly basic repertoire, the cream pies are the biggest pains in the ass, and this evening’s stayed true to form.
Things I learned over the three+ hours of wrestling with this fucker:
- If one ever happens upon a quick, easy recipe for butter pie crust, one should bookmark it so as to prevent having to settle for an inferior, ass-pain of a recipe next time one plans to make one.
- If one is looking for a novel upper-body workout, rolling the dough from one of these inferior recipes is surprisingly effective.
- If strange little brown flakes start appearing in your boiling vat of pie filling, it’s probably because it’s carmelizing at the bottom of the pan.
- It’s not a banana cream pie if you forget to add the bananas!
- Don’t walk away from your baking timer until you’ve checked to make sure it’s actually working.
But in the end, it’s all worth it, ’cause look how pretty it is!
"I'm a pretty, pretty pie," said in Teen Girl Squad voice.
The Dobler Effect 
Yay, pretty!
Your cranberry bread is also lovely.
We should put our respective baked goods in little strollers and bonnets for maximum effect.
Pretty-pretty princess pie!
BTW – You and Doug were kindred spirits last night. He did several rounds of battle with his pie crust before turning out a freakin’ awesome looking chocolate mousse pie. Hooray for a holiday dedicated to cooking, baking, and eating with friends and family!
I love that I had a kindred cursing spirit in College Park last night. More and more, I think that the difficulty level of a baked goods recipe increases as the number of ingredients decreases.
The exception being meringue. Oh, how I love making meringue, for both its fluffy goodness and ability to conceal a homely pie crust.
Happy hosting today!
If you can make Lemon meringue, I will worship at your feet…. or at least toss some awesome platitudes your way.
That’s so funny–
I just got my mom’s lemon meringue recipe Thursday night. It’s my #1 favorite pie ev-ar, so I’m going to try doing one soon. I’ll let you know how the experiment goes down.
Sold!
Oh dear….I hope it wasn’t the hamburger timer that stopped working! In any case, the pie looks divine.
It was, but it really wasn’t its fault!
I didn’t pay attention when I put it back on the counter and it was right up against something else, so it couldn’t tick properly. Once I moved it over a bit, it was its old reliable self.
LOVELY! Make me a meringue when I come to town. My Mom used to make mini meringue cookies with chocolate chips in them. YUM!
Did you really forget the bananas?