#fail pie

I’d made a pork pie the other day and had enough pie dough leftover for a single crust, and found myself remembering a recipe for ginger cream pie that I made several times back in my teens and loved. Dug out the old cookbook and looked it up, and spotted that there was also a chocolate cream pie that I can’t remember ever trying, and decided to make that instead. Possibly the first bad decision of a whole chain of them!

Error #1 - Let the pie dough come to room temp, rolled out and shaped the crust, pricked it all over with a fork.... forgot to re-chill it before baking it, so the sides slumped instead of remaining in place, leaving them only half the height of the deep 9″ pie dish. Argh.

Error #2 - Somehow missed the step of cooking the sugar-cornstarch-cocoa-milk mixture until well thickened, before cooking, covered, for an additional 15 minutes with occasional stirring, so the milk mixture was understandably pretty runny when I hit the next step. Sadly I didn’t clue into the missed step until many hours later, when I was trying to figure out where everything had gone so irredeemably wrong.

Error #3 - Beat three eggs yolks with more sugar, stir some of the hot mixture in, then add to the hot mixture. Think there was two small errors here, actually - I think I stirred in too much of the hot mixture, so instead of merely raising the temperature of the beaten eggs it started to cook them. More-or-less dumped all of the egg mix in at once, then stirred, instead of stirring while adding gradually. Also, once I added the eggs to the hot mixture, I think I overstirred.

Error #4 - a continuation of #2, really - even after continuing cooking for rather longer than the 10 minutes the recipe specified, the mix was still on the runny side. Instead of continuing to cook until it was the specified “very thick” I removed it from the heat and started it cooling, thinking it would thicken more as it cooled. A couple hours later it was still very runny. Returned it to double boiler, and after a much longer period of cooking and the addition of more cornstarch it eventually got “very thick” - about like a half-set chocolate pudding. Stuck it back in the fridge, cooled it again.

Error #5 - Once it was mostly cool it still hadn’t noticeably gelled any further. Went ahead and poured it into the baked shell anyway. Made meringue out of the egg whites; don’t think I whipped them enough both before and after adding he sugar, it was still at more of a soft peak than a stiff peak stage when I spread it on the pie and baked it.