My friend Garrett and I cooked Thanksgiving Dinner together this year. Garrett is partly American and I have family and friends that live in the US so we have both celebrated Thanksgiving many times before. Yet I'm still no expert and consulted a few friends before deciding what to cook.
I volunteered to make the pies (first time in my life) and asked my friend Allison of First Prize Pies for a couple of recipes. I made S'mores Pie and Apple Cheddar Pie and discovered that it is bloody hard to make a good pie!
The S'mores Pie was particularly difficult - it took forever to make the Graham Crackers for the crust and my chocolate filling was a strange consistency - maybe 'heavy cream' isn't quite the same thing in English and in German.
Making the Graham Crackers
Runny, bubbly chocolate filling...
After trying and failing to make the marshmallows twice - maybe because it was impossible to find corn sirup in any shop in Zurich and none of the replacements I came up with worked - I began improvising: The chocolate filling didn't taste very chocolatey so I added chocolate chunks for cakes, which I found in my cupboard:
Instead of marshmallow I decided to make meringue. I spread it onto the pie, torched it with my new blow torch (hours of fun - wow, I'm such a geek!) and baked it briefly:
I really had little luck with the S'mores Pie. I decided to add some toasted Marshmallows on top of the pie (I admit, I was looking for an excuse to use my blow torch again), only to discover that they are highly flammable.
It took me fifteen minutes to put seven toasted but unburnt marshmallows on the pie. When I was finally done I walked out of the kitchen holding the pie proudly only to trip and send the whole thing flying down the corridor and splat onto the floor!
I'm happy to say that despite all hurdles and floor dirt the pie was gobbled up with great gusto in no time!
