Avocado Pie FAIL!

Let me start by saying that this pie was DELICIOUS! It also looks like Slimer from the Ghostbusters cartoon. I’d say it also qualifies as a FAIL inspired by Pintrest.

Almost every week one of my favorite bogs, Serious Eats, has a Share Your Sweets photo roundup. This weekend’s challenge was “summer pie.” I had just bought a bag of HUGE, Costco-sized avocados (from Costco) and decided that since I’d purchased them in August they were a summer fruit and therefor I would look for a recipe for avocado pie (also because I realized WTF am I going to do with 7 huge avocados when they all ripen within 24 hours of each other?!). This seemed like a good plan to use up the smallest two (AKA normal sized) avocados.

Here were my inspirations:

Pinch My Salt’s seemingly simple avocado pie, as modified by chez us.

simple avocado pie from Pinch My Salt

inspiring avocado meringue pie from chez us

Yeah. Mistakes I made:

1. We didn’t have any sweetened condensed milk, so I googled how to sub evaporated milk and sugar (hint, it’s 3/4 cup of sugar for every 5 oz of evaporated milk, I eyeballed 1 1/3 cups of sugar into 12 oz of evaporated milk to “keep the sugar content down”). You have to heat the mixture to combine the sugar and then cool it completely before using it, mine was tepid. FAIL ONE.
2. I misread 3.5 oz of lemon juice for 3.5 Tbls. FAIL 2. Plus, I used lime, but that shouldn’t have mattered as much as the missing 1.5 Tbls of juice.
3. I tried to “bling out my pie” by slicing a small avocado into thin slices and fanning them in the crust before pouring in the goop. FAIL 3. SPLORT!

Oh, you want to see how mine came out? Sure, OK:

avocado lime pie with meringue topping

attempting to serve avocado pie

VERDICT: I will try it again with the right ingredients, without sliced avocado, and without the meringue topping and maybe just a dollop of plain yogurt or unsweetened whipped cream. Even with the slightly reduced sugar it was a seriously SWEET dessert. I remember sweetened condensed milk as a more mellow sweet, kinda caramel-y, rather than the assertive WHITE SUGAR sweet that I got from the glop I made. With so many possible easy fixes, how can I not try to make this again in the future?

avocado lime pie “glamor shot”

I know I’m not going to win any food photography contests any tim soon, but I really did want to try with this! Look, I had props and everything! I was going to cut open the avocado and display the 1/2 with the pit, but decided against “wasting” good fruit on such a deliciously sloppy pie.

FINAL LATE NIGHT THOUGHT: If I rename this Slimer Pie, would that make it better?

NUTRITIONAL INFO: I don’t want to know. I guessed 7 WW PointsPlus per 1/8th. It might be closer to 11. Like I said, I don’t want to know. I ate my slice 90 minutes ago and now I have a slight sugar hangover.

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Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

OMG, you guys, these cookies are AMAZING, tiny, buttery, slightly sweet, matcha scented gems. Plus I got to use my cookie gun. Yeah, you heard me: cookie gun. Well, technically it’s called a cookie press, but look at it!

Kuhn Rikon Cookie Press

Yeah, that’s a cookie gun.

For these cookies I was inspired by Food Network‘s Honey Spritz Cookies, found via The Foodie’s Kitchen; but those cookies sounded too wintery so I had to change them without trying the originals or having used a cookie press in probably 15 years. I’m living on the edge here. The edge of DELICIOUS!

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

• 2 c minus 2 tsp all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp matcha (potent green tea powder)
• 1 stick (8 Tbl) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/3 c white sugar
• 1 egg (large)
• 1/4 c honey
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F after putting the racks in the 1/3 and 2/3 position. Move two clean, unlined baking sheets away from the oven to keep them cool.
2. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and matcha in a medium bowl and whisk to combine.
3. In your mixer bowl, beat the room temperature butter with the sugar. Beat the butter and sugar on medium high, stopping every few minutes to scrape the bowl down. In about 5 minutes you should have fluffy, glossy, creamed butter.
4. Use cooking spray to lube a measuring cup and measure out your honey.
5. Add the honey, egg, and vanilla extract to the creamed butter. Mix to combine, stopping to scrape the bowl down every minute or so.
6. Following the directions that came with your cookie press, fill the chamber about 3/4 full of dough (I make small blobs and shove them in and then keep packing them in until it looks full). *
7. Press out your cookies! Fill two whole trays. **
8. Bake for 5 minutes, rotate the pans front to back and top to bottom (unless you’re cooking in a convection oven, then just subtract a minute), and then bake another 6 minutes for 11 minutes total. ***
9. Let cool for 1-2 minutes before moving to wire cooling racks to cool completely.

* It will take 2-3 loads of cookie press to shape all the cookies. There will be a bit of ugly, raw dough at the end that you can’t shape., just eat it because you know you want to!

** The first few might come out ugly, that’s OK, pull them off the try and you can re-stuff them into the press later.

*** I baked mine for 6 minutes and 6 minutes and they came out a bit browner on the edges than I’d have liked. If your third tray is going in the oven solo, just use the top rack and bake for 11 minutes.

Nutritional Info: 1 Weight Watchers PointsPlus point per cookie/1 Tbl of raw dough (every nibble counts!)

raw cookies

baked cookies

PS- Does anyone know how to get my baking sheets CLEAN again? Bon Ami and elbow grease hardly make a dent in the baked on brown spots!

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Quick Coffee Cake

not my cake, but similar looking

Ben’s parents were in town over the long weekend. They stayed at his mom’s brother’s house, with his family, near the Tenlytown metro stop (not far from my aunt and uncle’s house). I’ll recap our tourist’s dream weekend later, for now I just wanted to share a link to the Quick Coffee Cake recipe I served when Ben’s parents and cousins came over for brunch on Sunday (his aunt and uncle went out of town for the weekend).

I’ve never tried making coffee cake before, but I learned, by reading recipes, that the gooey layer in coffee cake is often coffee soaked chopped dates! Who knew? No wonder I was never a fan of the goo, I usually love sweets and really like dates but I just don’t like coffee.

Time to bust out your tube pans (or 1/2 the recipe and make it in a 9×9″ square pan).

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A guy bakes a pie

for the first time ever, see the video here:

http://www.familyfeedbag.com/2013/05/a-reader-makes-his-first-apple-pie-and.html

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Lime Pound Cake with Chocolate Drizzle

This is not a big fluffy cake, this is a short, dense cake that does well with a tall glass of iced suntea and a wedge or lime, or a slushy margarita, or even a nice cuppa tea. Milk could theoretically be served with it as well, but that might be a dairy overload.

Just know that it won’t bake up much, so if you’re looking for a tall cake, make it in a smaller pan. I happen to like a short, dense pound cake that isn’t 4″ tall. This way I get to have two slice and think that they’re really just one.

Happy baking! This recipe was inspired by How Sweet Eats.

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Carrot (Bran) Muffins

Despite having 2 cups of crush bran cereal, these have just a hint of bran to them; the molasses, brown sugar, and cinnamon add enough spice to hide it. And the apple sauce and carrots make these a deliciously moist breakfast treat. Good “first time” muffins too, because they don’t tunnel (over stir) easily.

3 c AP flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking power
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbl cinnamon
2 c crumbled bran cereal flakes
4 eggs, beaten
1/2 c applesauce
1 c oil
1 1/4 c firmly packed brown sugar
3 c finely grated carrots (4 carrots, grated with a coarse microplane grater is perfect)
1 c currants

Heat oven to 350 F. Lube muffin tins or line them with paper.

In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon together. Add crushed bran flakes.

In another large bowl (I used an 8 c measuring cup) combine beaten eggs, apple sauce, oil and brown sugar. Stir in carrots and currants.

Pour egg mixture over flour mixture and combine until just barely moist through the flour. There will still be some floury bran flakes, don’t worry about them.

Makes 24 normal size muffins.

Bake for 20 minutes, rotate tins in the oven 1/2 way through (just like tires!).

adapted from Muffins: Sweet & Savory Comfort Food

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Raw Cookie Dough That’s Safe to Eat

 

 

 

 

 

This idea was so good that I have to share it: Cookie Dough That’s Safe to Eat ~ Cupcake Project. Why didn’t I think of it myself? Just leave the eggs out, right?

 

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