You Know That Thing They Always Say About Baking? Forget It
The Pie Road went on an unexpected hiatus - a crazy work week in March, followed by being sick, followed by a trip to England, followed by…life. But I am back. And although now this pie feels like ancient history, I wanted to write about a chocolate pie crust that went wrong and then went right.
Major fails are very frustrating for me. Since I’m not a professional baker, I don’t have a ton of time to redo the things that don’t work out, but I did want to make the chocolate pie dough work, so after it spectacularly failed in January, I decided to come back to it in March, for a birthday pie I was making for me and my sister-in-law.
In January when I tried to make a flaky chocolate pie crust, it was a disaster. The recipe had no baking time and because the crust is already dark brown, it was hard to tell when it was done. One of the cues for blind baking is that it is browned a bit on the bottom and it has an all-over matte finish. Well, it never got the all-over matte finish so I kept adding another 2, 3, 4 minutes, until it was obviously burnt.
In March I made a black forest birthday pie. I did some research on how long it should bake and basically it came down to following the bake time on the recipe closely since it was hard to tell visually when it was done. But, my recipe didn’t have a bake time, so I ultimately followed Erin McDowell’s standard parbaking instructions and baked for 15 minutes with the baking weights and ten minutes with no baking weights. I trusted that it looked done and hoped for the best. I figured since I was just serving this to family that has had a lot of my pies, the stakes were low and just went with it. But I had to laugh because so much of baking is to treat bake times as a guide but know the other doneness cues, and success here was basically to forget all that and trust the bake time.
The pie turned out great and I used my new piping skills to be a bit fancy with the whipped cream!
Hopefully you can see my first comment but I also wanted to compliment your piping skills!