Needless to say, there was much to celebrate, and I felt Excess deserved a most excessive pie for his birthday– something tailored.  Something he wouldn’t have to share with anyone else if he didn’t want to.

Something that said, Thanks for the penguin feathers, dude.

Since Excess is a chocoholic of the highest order (we’re talking about a man who never goes a day without, whose couch is habitually strewn with Hershey bar wrappers), I decided to make a pie that would test his endurance. I envisioned a buttery chocolate crust filled entirely with chocolate ganache and topped with chocolate whipped cream.  The question I wanted to answer with such a pie was two-fold:

1. Exactly how much chocolate could I jam into an 8″ pie?

2. And, would Excess love it, or crap out half-way through his slice? 

I couldn’t think of a single person who loves chocolate enough to survive a slice of a pie as rich as the one I planned to make, but if anyone could, I was sure it was Excess.  But no matter the hyperbole of the culinary experiment, this is Piesthetics, people!  So of course I wanted to make Excess’s pie beautiful, too…even if I really, really wanted to see if it would send him into a premature food coma…or, you know, diabetic shock…before he finished his slice. 

I started by making a chocolate shortbread crust by substituting Dutch cocoa powder for a third of the flour in my standard shortbread recipe.  The cool thing about shortbread crusts, in my opinion–and the reason I chose one for this pie– is that you don’t have to screw with pie weights, etc., in order to blind bake them.  You just cut together a shortbread recipe and then press it into the bottom of a pie plate, working from the center to the edges, and then up the sides about an inch.  Then prick it all over with a fork, and Viola! ready for the oven.  Shortbread crusts don’t move around or slump toward the middle the way a normal pastry sometimes does when you try to blind bake it, and I find them to be sturdier.  Perfect for a filling as dense as the one I was planning…

Chocolate Shortbread Crust*

• 1 c. flour
• 1/2 c. cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 sticks (12 Tbl.) butter
• 1/4 tsp. salt

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes, or till the crust looks dry.  Cool completely (like, over night) before filling.  *Now, I should mention that this is for an 8″ pie.  Normally, I would use a much larger pan and a whole shortbread recipe (this one is cut down by about a quarter), but this birthday pie business is about personal-pan pies, as it were, because birthdays are about presents, cake (and pie!), and NOT SHARING.   

Total Chocolate Quotient at this point: 1/2 c., or 4 oz.

I kinda-sorta-not really followed a recipe for a Belgian Chocolate Ganache Tart for the filling, and, what the hell!, tossed in way more chocolate than necessary.  It called for 8 ounces.  I estimate I used about 12.  Standard ganache procedure, people:  bring the cream and sugar (and, in this case, coffee) to an almost-boil and then pour over chopped chocolate in a large mixing bowl.  Stir with a spoon or whisk in a figure-eight till all chocolate melts, then beat in the eggs and egg yolks one at a time till mixture is smooth and incorporated.  

Chocolate Ganache Filling

• 12 oz. bittersweet chocolate (I recommend finding something 65% cocoa or greater)
• 1 c. heavy cream
• 1 Tbl. strong prepared coffee
• 1/3 c. confectioner’s sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 large egg yolks

I beat another egg yolk with some water to make an egg wash and brushed it over the cooled shortbread crust, and then I poured the ganache into the crust and popped it into a 375 oven till it was soft-set (about 40 minutes).  I cooled the pie on a wire rack afterward for about an hour, till I could handle it without mitts, and then put it into the fridge to chill and set.  

Chocolate Quotient, crust + filling:  16 oz.

About 30 minutes before it was time to serve, I garnished what had turned into the HEAVIEST PIE EVER, SERIOUSLY YOU COULD HURT SOMEONE WITH THIS THING, JUST WHIP IT AT THEM LIKE A FRISBEE.  I originally thought I would do a whipped cream topping with a dusting of grated chocolate, and had envisioned something light brown–just a hint of chocolate.  And then I started beating the cream that was left with Dutch cocoa powder, and as it got thicker and darker, I wondered exactly how much chocolate I could get in it… 

Turns out, a lot.  Plus some butter.  Also powdered sugar. 

The result was richer than whipped cream, but lighter than a buttercream, and packed with chocolate–nearly a cup of it–plus chocolate shavings on top. The finished product is this truly alarming Chocolate Ganache Pie–in which Excess mired himself like a sabertooth cat in the Labrea tar pits– comprised almost entirely of chocolate, heavy cream, egg yolks, and butter, with a nominal amount of  powdered sugar and flour. 

Final Chocolate Quotient:  24 oz.

Final Excess v. Pie Verdict:  Excess trumps everyone, goes in for seconds, steals people’s left over bites that they just couldn’t finish, grins maniacally.  And then falls asleep on the couch:

 Piesthetics: Poor / Okay / Decent / Good / Very Good / Excellent   This pie sliced up well, maintained its shape, and presented nicely.  But it was really, really rich.

Being that this is the first post and all, I figured I’d kick things off by introducing myself.  Hi.  I’m EB, and I make pie.  A lot of pie. 

It all started in August of 2006.  Actually, it started much, much earlier than that—like, when I was born with a brain that loops like a baroque fugue, or when I first watched my beloved grandma made an apple pie with the mesmerized intensity peculiar to tiny children.  But for the purpose of this story, let’s just say it all started in August of 2006, when the latent, obsessive baking impulse in me finally found an outlet and an audience in a group of grad students who needed an excuse to STOP READING and blow off some steam.

I was entering my last year as an MFA candidate at UW-Madison, and two of my best friends from college, Billie J. Pilgrim and Short Notes on Excess, had just moved to Madison to start PhD programs (Yeah.  They followed me across the country.  I think they must have known what was coming…).  In a quest to make friends with the new people in the department, they decided to host a potluck dinner party, and I signed up to bring dessert. 

I’ll admit I wanted to show off. 

I was terrified—as I almost always am—at the prospect of meeting new people, and I wanted to make something really amazing, something that would make them remember me, goddammit!  When I spotted honest-to-god Key Limes at the co-op, everything came together in a perfect storm of neurotic competitiveness.  I stood in the produce section for a good long time, staring covetously at the meticulous stacks of green and yellow fruit, a slow, maniacal smile spreading over my face. 

Key Lime Pie had been a favorite of mine for a decade, ever since my parents took our family to Key West for a vacation when I was fifteen and we ordered Key Lime Pie at every single restaurant we went to.  I had never had a slice that measured up outside of Florida, and as I stood under the cruel fluorescent lights of the co-op, stroking each tiny lime like a complete nutter, I wondered if it was possible—could I make a Key Lime Pie to rival Key Lime Pies made in the Keys?

At that point, I had never made my own pastry, and the only pies I had made were Dutch Apple (a variation on my grandma’s recipe), Pumpkin, and Pecan—all for Thanksgiving.  But, in the way of crazy people, this complete lack of knowledge and experience did not daunt me in the slightest.  I began raking limes into my basket and muttering things about upping the ante and doing Key Lime up right.   

The pie I produced did not rival a real Key Lime Pie made in the Keys.  But it was pretty freakin’ delicious, and in the course of making it, I learned how to make my own pastry and blind-bake a crust, neither of which I had ever done.  Plus…the people I met seemed to like me.  They said things like “We should do this again!,” and “See you next week!.”  

And they were totally sincere. 

I was pretty sure this had to do with the fact that I showed up bearing dessert.

Soon, I was plying these new friends with pie once a week.  People started introducing me as The Pie Girl, and our regular group expanded till I was feeding pie to 8 or 10 people every Saturday.  My kitchen became like a laboratory where I performed experiments and tested theories.  For an entire year, I made a different pie every week, and each time, I came to my mixing bowls and pie plates and spices with the dual intent of teaching myself something new about the craft of piemaking, and giving these new people a reason to stay friends with me. 

At some point in February, I coined the term Piesthetics to describe the material goal I came to the kitchen with each week: 

Pies that not only slice up beautifully and maintain their shape on the plate, but also taste like nirvana cased in pastry.

It offends my artistic and logical sensibilities when a gorgeous, perfectly triangular slice of restaurant pie ends up tasting gluey and wretched. Maybe it’s naive, but shouldn’t beautiful food also be delicious?  Isn’t that the culinary ideal anyone who cooks is striving for?  By the same token, it bugs me immensely when a divinely inspired summer berry pie—one of those glorious confections bursting with blueberries from the farmers’ market and raspberries stolen from the neighbor’s garden, a touch of lemon and vanilla, and a crust of the flakiest sugar-crusted pastry—ends up looking like a car wreck on a plate when you slice it up.  I hate—hate—the seeming necessity of the sentence “It isn’t pretty, but it tastes good.”

Why can’t I have both?

Why can’t every pie look good and taste good, too? “Piesthetics” became a rubric to describe the success or failure of my experiment each week:

A pie with excellent piesthetics slices up easily, maintains a triangular shape, and also makes you want to abscond to the back room to be alone with your  slice.  Or smack the fork from your neighbor’s hand and seize theirs.  A pie with excellent piesthetics keeps pie-eaters teetering between blissed-out oblivion and anarchical mutiny.

A pie with poor piesthetics falls apart when served, needs to be eaten with a spoon rather than a fork, and may also have something odd about it in terms of taste or texture—too much cinnamon or cardamom, a mealy crust, or too much corn starch in the filling.  No one wants seconds of a pie with poor piesthetics. 

Over the course of the year, I worked hard to produce pies with excellent piesthetics.  I tweaked and refined my pastry recipe till it was light and flaky but also elastic enough to roll out easily.  I perfected my crumb crust and experimented with methods for weaving lattice-top pies.  I took requests from my pie-eating test subjects and made pies that I had no intention of EVER tasting, like the infamous Peanutbutter-Chocolate-Banana Pie that everyone seemed to like, but which I deemed the Batbarf Pie about four minutes into assembling it.  I developed some serious confidence in the kitchen and kicked off several great friendships those Saturdays when we all took a break to share dessert and chat for an hour or two.

But most of all, I learned to pay attention to the details.

I thought a lot about what a slice of pie meant to an eater and how that was communicated on the plate.  I thought about the kind of pie I would want to be served and what Plato’s Ideal Slice of Pie would look like.  Maybe it sounds crazy, but I thought long and hard about the difference between a slice of lattice-top Peach and Apricot Pie with a sugar-dusted crust and a slice of lattice-top Peach and Apricot Pie without a sugar-dusted crust. 

I admit I’m a person who has trouble communicating deep feelings without the aid (and distance) of writing, so to me, the difference between a sugared crust and a non-sugared crust says a whole lot.  A sugared crust, to me, means the person who made that pie is inviting you in.  They want their pie to be so pretty that you just have to have a slice, not only because they’re confident in their work, but also because they want you to enjoy yourself, and they’re willing to take the time to make sure you know, consciously or otherwise, that someone cares about you enough to make that happen. 

I know some of my pie-eating test subjects didn’t really notice a difference week to week, and might not have noticed a difference had the two pies been right next to each other.  That’s okay.  I know I chose a weird language with which to tell them how much I appreciated them, but I think it was important to say it all the same.  Even if I was spelling it out in flour, butter, and sugar.

So, that’s how Piesthetics started. 

Now, I’m beginning the experiment again and recording the results in blog form, because, as any good scientist knows, replicating results is key.  And as any good baker knows, any experiment in which the control variable is a series of Xs and Os is worth replicating again and again.