An Elegant Dessert

Let's face it: pie is homey. It's comfort food, something that your grandmother could whip up and serve after a family dinner. Pie in our culture shows up on the "family" holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and 4th of July.

There are problems with elevating pie into a finer dessert. Presentation is so vitally important for high-end desserts. Cupcakes are easy to present with flair, with their ever present buttercream that is so simple to pipe attractively, and the ease of adding color and accents to the top of the cupcake. Pie, on the other hand, tends to be always presented in one way: in a wedge. It has very natural colors, which are beautiful, in a homey sort of way.

Chocolate Pecan Pie

It’s not about what I know, it’s about what I don’t know.

When we started this blog, my wife sat down and wrote out a schedule of pies to make. I brainstormed 52 topics, she typed them up and fit them into a calendar that would make sense from a seasonal standpoint.  That way, I wasn't making Strawberry Pie in December and Apple Pie in June. And this week’s topic was Chocolate Pecan Pie.

It starts with a completely pre-baked crust. I wanted to try out a new crust, so I made it up, carefully followed the finicky directions about temperature and cooling the ingredients and letting the crust rest. I rolled it out, fit it into the pie pan, docked the crust, let it cool more in the fridge, and put it into a hot oven to bake.  Then I sat down to write a blog post about how much stuff I knew about pie crust. It was going to be great.

After ten minutes, I looked in the oven to find disaster. Despite the docking, the crust had inflated in the middle and slipped down the sides of the pan. This wouldn't do, this wouldn't do at all. I tried to poke holes in the middle and maybe stretch it back, but I've been down this road before and knew that it was over before I started.

It’s not about what I know, it’s about what I don’t know.

Election Special - Hypocrite Pie

It began with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. I invited my future wife to join my family at the day-after-Thanksgiving meal and euchre tournament that has been held at my cousin’s house for as long as anyone can remember. I probably said something along the lines of: “We ought to make something to take along, huh?”

We were young. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two. We hadn't lived a lot of life yet, hadn't had a ton of time to learn to cook. I had just graduated from college and was just starting to find my way into the kitchen. We had no clue, on so many levels.

My future wife being the woman that she is, she went to Borders and bought the biggest dessert cookbook she could find, “Classic Home Desserts,” by Richard Sax. We made the apple pie recipe as a test, called it good (it still is) and made it to take with us to this family gathering. The cookbook went back on the shelf.  We had no idea how much of an influence that book would have on the rest of our lives.