…should avert your eyes now.
This was supposed to be a Meyer lemon and ginger pie (a variation on the Shaker lemon pie). What it turned out to be was my first complete baking disaster. There have been things in the past that I’ve made that I have refrained from showing you, but those have all been things that I ate anyway.
This was inedible.
My mom (who is willing to eat almost anything) and I each had one bite and promptly put our forks down. I threw it away immediately, bypassing the trashcan in my kitchen and carrying it down to the dumpster so it wouldn’t be in my apartment any longer than was necessary.
I don’t know what I did wrong. So far, my best theory is that I used too much lemon juice and the extra acidity caused the eggs to not set when baking. My second best theory is that I covered too much of the pie with foil for the first half of the baking time, but it’s a distant second as I don’t really think that’s responsible. I also realised as I was constructing it that I had never made a two-crust pie before – thus the extraordinarily thick edges (I wasn’t sure how much extra dough I needed for sealing things up. ‘Not that much’ is the answer.).
I have one more bag of Meyer lemons left and they are being used in these Meyer lemon iced cupcakes that I’m planning on making tomorrow, so hopefully there will be a successful baking post then.
April 8, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Oh, dear Anne…your first complete baking disaster? You would feel much better if you could see photographs of some of mine! Once my boss at the high-end catering firm where I worked said my raspberry bombe “looked like afterbirth” and later she claimed my lemon meringue pie had no sugar in it (was that possible? I think she ate the whole thing and then had to cover her tracks). Oh, and the disastrous Chicago-style pizza I tried to make a couple of months ago. So distressing, I haven’t tried since… You were due for a bomb (but not a bombe!).
May 13, 2009 at 6:33 pm
[...] apple pie and, though I’ve helped her make it, I’ve never done one on my own. The last two-crust pie I’d made was nothing less than a disaster, so I was a bit nervous about how this would turn [...]