Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor handiwork. But other times, if you're both stubborn and resourceful enough, you can get yourself out of whatever jam a shit recipe has put you in. I have one such story for you.
The recipe in question was for a chocolate cream pie, which I will not link to here because it's a failed recipe. We were having my wife's parents over for dinner last night to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday. The plan was to make a key lime pie for dessert, which would be no trouble at all. I use a recipe for key lime that I found online that never fails. Plus, we already had a ready-made graham cracker pie crust on hand for it. Bingo bango, one pie down.
But my wife had also grabbed a ready-made chocolate pie crust at the store, and I had no go-to recipe to use with that one. So I did a lazy search and found a chocolate cream pie recipe that looked simple enough. All I had to do was beat a few ingredients together over a stovetop, pour it into the shell, stick it in the fridge, and that was it.
That was not it. Like everything else online, cooking-recipe searches have been rendered unreliable thanks to SEO-gaming, AI fuckery, and all other manner of digital nonsense. I could have eyeballed this particular recipe more carefully, as good chefs ought to. But this second pie was a throwaway, and I wasn't feeling terribly ambitious.
I should have paused when the recipe called for 1 and 2/3rds of a cup water to be mixed into a filling that featured minimal thickening elements (cornstarch, condensed milk, egg yolks). But I followed the instructions to the letter anyway, or what instructions the recipe had to offer me. It told me to "cook on low heat until mixture thickens." No specific amount of time was offered, so I stirred for a good 30 minutes before I figured that it was thick enough. Then I poured the loose stool into the chocolate shell, stuck it in the fridge, and waited for the pie to set.
After an hour cooling, it had not set.
After two hours cooling, it had not set.
After a full afternoon, it had not set. I still had a pie crust with a fucking lake sitting in the middle of it. I double-checked the recipe to make sure I hadn't measured anything wrong, or if I had maybe missed a vital step. But no, I had been a good little boy. This pie was still fucked.
The key lime pie, meanwhile, turned out just groovy after a few minutes in the oven. So, using my powers of culinary deduction, I said FUCK IT and threw the chocolate cream pie in there, in a last-ditch attempt to get it to set. After 30 goddamn minutes at 350 degrees, the inside finally stopped jiggling. I took it out, let it cool, and served it. The picture atop this blog was the end result.
Was this pie edible? Yes. Was it amazing? No, but that was mostly because the pie shell my wife had bought was gluten free, and therefore lacking in various ways on the palate. But everyone ate the second pie and liked it, and my father-in-law was a happy man. Keep in mind that this recipe had said nothing about using an oven. The decision to put it in there was 100-percent me, and it was the right one. You tried to bring me down in front of my family, pie. But guess what? I turned that shit around on you. I beat you, pie. So suck it.
I'm never making chocolate cream pie again.
