I am not a baker.
And when I say I’m not a baker, what I mean is that I burn cookies because I get bored (and full) after baking and eating most of the first batch, I make lopsided and sometimes gooey cakes from the box, and my brownies have a fifty-fifty shot of turning out hard as a rock.
My theory is that there is just too much math involved in baking, and math and I do not get along.
However, not being a baker aside, I have found that sometimes – if the stars align and the mood is right and the recipe actually makes sense to me – I can manage to make tasty baked goods. Tasty enough that when Thanksgiving rolled around and food items needed to be brought to family dinner, I decided to bake something. I was gonna go with pumpkin cheesecake bars, but there was a worry that no one was bringing pie (and you can’t have Thanksgiving without pie!).
Being the ever accommodating individual that I am, I changed up my baking plans and settled on Mini Pumpkin Pies instead. It seemed like a no-brainer really. I like pumpkin pie. I like bite-sized things. Combining the two was not rocket science.
Luckily for me, the recipe I selected on Pinterest wasn’t rocket science either. It included only five ingredients, two cooling racks, one electrical appliance, and one muffin pan. I could totally handle a line-up like that.
The hardest part for me in making the mini pies was dealing with the mini pie crusts. The recipe called for using refrigerated pie crusts, cut down into 4″ size by a cookie cutter. I had no cookie cutter. I tried using a glass tumbler but it was too small. Then my father, who cannot seem to stay out of the kitchen when I am cooking/baking/breathing at his house, handed me a martini glass to try instead. Turned out to be almost the perfect size. Always helps to have connections with an extensive collection of booze glassware, folks!
For once I made no substitutions on the ingredient list, but as there were only five things on it that wasn’t very surprising. My pies did turn out a bit plainer in appearance than those in the recipe, however. I didn’t have cookie cutters in the shapes of leaves and pumpkins to make decorations for the top, and I was using a glass to cut the crusts so there wasn’t decorative edges on them.
Luckily the little pies turned out tasty, so how fancy they looked wasn’t really important. None of them were burnt, none of them exploded, none of them tasted like the filling hadn’t been mixed thoroughly. Once they’d cooled off and had a chance to really firm up they were just as good as any pumpkin pie I’ve ever had from a store bakery.
I’m pretty proud of that really. I might even try to bake again sometime. Just to see if it was a fluke or if perhaps maybe my poor baking skills have finally improved. Anything is possible, right?
SOURCE – Mini Pumpkin Pies
